


Saving Sergeant Barnes

by vulcansmirk



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-08-08 22:15:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7775752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Listen, I guess I don’t... I don’t mind, if you look through them,” Bucky mumbles. “But I don’t want you getting your hopes up, okay? There may not...” He grimaces. “There may not be a cure.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Steve just shakes his head, sits back. “I can’t think like that, Buck. I won’t. There’s gotta be a way to give you your life back, and I’m gonna find it.”</i>
</p><p>When Steve finds a connection between Bucky's trigger words and the memories in his notebooks, he pours everything he has into deciphering the clues and cobbling Bucky's agency back together. But the road to recovery is long and perilous, and Bucky seems adamant that he stay off it altogether. Steve is left to answer the impossible question: how do you save someone who doesn't want to be saved?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stay awake with me.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2016 Stucky Big Bang! This fic comes to you in five parts, each one angstier than the last.... but it ends well, I promise.
> 
> Also, as part of my obscenely long planning process, I compiled a playlist for this fic that follows the plot to the letter. If you'd like to listen in (and maybe get just a little bit spoiled), you can find that [here](http://vulcansmirk.tumblr.com/post/148993016565/saving-sergeant-barnes-a-playlist-for-the). I also have links to and tags for other aspects of my planning process over on my [blog](http://vulcansmirk.tumblr.com), if you're into that sort of thing. Or we can just chat about the fic! Or about something else. Any chatting, really. (Please. I'm so lonely.) (Said Steve. OH SNAP)
> 
> Rated E for future chapters.
> 
> Also, behold!!!! [AMAZING art for this fic](http://lkaet.tumblr.com/post/149652225277/saving-sergeant-barnes-by-vulcansmirk-here-are) courtesy of @lkaet over on Tumblr!! Seriously, I'm just. In love. By e

Bucky dreams.

He dreams of light—one headlight, a single solid cone stretching before him, cutting a vicious swathe out of the dark. He hears the wind whipping past, feels the prickle of a mild winter chill, smells the threat of rain. He sees taillights materialize ahead, dull, red, throbbing beacons, uncommonly violent for such a quiet night. And he, another uncommonly violent thing, approaches those little red lights. Passes them. Strikes at the space in front of them—there’s something important there, something he needs to—to... something he needs. There’s a crash, too small and quiet for the gravity of the event. He grinds to a halt. Kills the lights.

Bucky dreams of ice. It’s on his skin, a greedy parasite leaching away his body heat. But it retreats; it’s on the window now, sweating in the wavering light of a nearby candle. The city outside is dark, muffled by night and a thick layer of snow—but inside, the room is bathed in honey. The couch cushions are on the floor, and Bucky lies on top of them, covered head-to-toe in a scratchy wool blanket. A slight form fidgets next to him. A sharp elbow digs into his back, shuddering so bad it starts both of them vibrating; he hears the breath rattling inside a cage of rickety ribs, the _clackety-clack_ of teeth ineffectively clenched, and Bucky doesn’t know he’s moving until he’s already there, curled around a small, spindly candle flame. Something in his chest cracks in half, the sound of it so thunderous he’s sure the whole world can hear. A piece of him sloughs away, submerged, as the person in his arms settles finally into sleep.

Bucky dreams of metal, and he dreams of glass. He can feel gears digging their teeth into his soft pink fingertips, callouses blooming beneath the marks; he feels the slimy grit of oil on his hands, sees the way it stains his skin black—it’s oil, and then it’s gunpowder, too, and it burns, and the stench of it burrows into his nostrils, takes root in the back of his head. One blackened hand still smarts from striking the car window. Shards of glass turn the road into a map of the cosmos, glittering, horrifying, large, and the pain in his hand spreads, black clouds of it coiling up through his flesh arm, the bone breaking slowly, in reverse. His metal hand is curled in a fist, and the rusty smell of blood joins the gunpowder in lining Bucky’s throbbing skull. Bones shatter beneath that fist over and over again until finally, they’re bones he recognizes, the ribs no longer rickety, but still somehow fragile enough to fall to pieces in his hands. A pair of glassy blue eyes—

Bucky dreams of water. He dreams of the way the sunset fractures on the surface of the Hudson, the sky bleeding scarlet like an open wound—but it’s clean, and his eyes sting for it. He sees the bruises and the oozing, split skin he’s left on a familiar face, sees the confession gushing from blue eyes almost swollen shut, feels himself splitting open from the power of a shared memory. He sees the way his friend’s blood clouds the current of a different river, the way it mingles with the water fleeing his friend’s lungs when Bucky drops his body on the shore; Bucky can feel his own hand curled around this red-speckled throat a thousand times over, and his eyes sting for that, too. The water pulls his clothing tight across his skin, pulls his skin tight across his chest, and Bucky turns away, shivering, from the only warmth he’s ever known. A fine film of frost sprouts across his limbs, the water of the river crystallizing into a dense block in his stomach. The ice sinks its claws into the marrow of his bones, and he forgets what it is to be a moth around a flame.

Bucky dreams of light, of headlights, curling toward him. He watches them come, and he watches them go, the rumble of the car’s engine rising and falling like the snore of a slumbering beast. The beast remains asleep, and the car continues on its way, and it’s better. See? It’s better, because Bucky was never there.

 

*~*~*

 

Steve doesn’t dream.

He can’t stop himself from watching as Bucky goes into the ice again, his face so serene as the cryochamber fills with mist (and when was the last time this process was so peaceful?). Bucky’s eyes fall shut, and Steve’s stay wide open.

He sits in that room for a long time. Longer than even he realizes. Bucky goes under in the harsh light of high noon; by the time Steve comes up again, the sky outside is black, so black it’s almost turning gray, speckled with fading stars Steve can’t see. He makes out the vague outline of Bucky’s face, thrown into relief by the honey-colored lights of sleek, futuristic machines.

Bucky’s there. Right there. Steve can see him, and yet he can’t think of a time when he felt more alone.

Steve leaves that room, finally. He doesn’t quite remember doing it. He must find his way back to the residential level of the palace, though, because he wakes—again, surrounded by a harsh, hazy light, the jungle outside steaming beneath the full gaze of the midday sun—in a bed. His, he guesses. Comfortable, but cold, too.

T’Challa chalks Steve’s late start up to his exhaustion after the fight with Tony. Steve doesn’t correct him. The King of Wakanda treats Steve to a quiet but opulent breakfast. The coffee is the best Steve’s ever had. It feels like a handful of ashes in his mouth, but he smiles, says thank you, accepts another cup.

They plan a prison break. It’s T’Challa’s idea, but Steve leaps on board immediately—that’s one mistake, at least, that Steve has a chance to fix. The plans distract him. Not completely, but enough. He starts to feel pins and needles in the tips of his fingers and toes.

Before they go, Steve writes a letter. They’re about to cause Tony a lot of problems, after all—more than they’ve already caused, anyway—and the least he deserves is an explanation. As he’s handing the letter over to one of T’Challa’s staffers, Steve makes another decision, and before he can question it too much, he asks the staffer to procure a couple burner phones and send one with the letter. There are a lot of reasons to let this bridge burn, Steve knows, but he can’t quite bring himself to strike the match.

The operation is surprisingly simple. For Steve, it’s like falling back into his skin: his mind may be far away, but his body remembers well by now the best way to knock a guy out without making a sound. He lets his muscles take over while T’Challa handles all the complicated stuff, the transportation, the locks. He’s brought a handful of bodyguards along, a seamless team of silent women in the strangest, most efficient-looking stealth suits Steve has ever laid eyes on, and they come in handy when it turns out Wanda’s been put in a shock collar and straitjacket. She needs to be carried out of her cell.

Steve doesn’t know whether his tentative new ally can tell that he’s not really there. But he’s grateful for T’Challa’s help nonetheless.

Sam knows. He turns around at the sound of footsteps, and his expression is cold and hard right up until he sees who the footsteps belong to, and then his face cracks open on a brilliant smile. Steve smiles back, or tries to; he thinks he succeeds for an instant, but it falls quickly, and he knows Sam sees it as soon as it does.

Steve puts the shiny little explosive device on Sam’s door himself, blowing a tiny hole in the locking mechanism so Sam can push the door open. Another small explosion, and then a string of curses drifts toward them from the direction of Scott Lang’s cell, and Steve looks over, waits for Scott to stop jumping around and sucking on his now-injured finger. When Scott makes eye contact, Steve just nods, unable to put into words what it means to him that this relative stranger would go to prison for him. Clint, having been freed by one of T’Challa’s bodyguards, passes Steve and claps a hand on his shoulder—a solid gesture, a mark of loyalty. Steve tries not to buckle beneath its weight.

He forces himself to look at Wanda. Touches her arm gently when she goes by. Her eyes are slow to find his; her face is gaunt, her skin gray, her gaze hollow. She’s carried forward by the bodyguards, and Steve can’t tear his eyes away.

He walks out of the Raft prison shoulder-to-shoulder with Sam. Nobody says a word until they’re safely ensconced in T’Challa’s glassy jet, halfway back to Wakanda.

Steve’s seated in a far corner of the jet, watching from afar as a Wakandan medic scans Wanda head-to-toe with some kind of handheld device. Sam sits beside him, the proximity of his body heat an oblique comfort. Scott and Clint are a little ways off, the former looking around with the unabashed awe of a child, the latter watching, shaking his head, smiling faintly. T’Challa’s silhouette looms in the pilot’s seat, his steady hand resting on the throttle.

Steve can feel it when Sam resolves himself to speak. He braces himself.

“So,” Sam begins slowly. “Where’s Grumpy Cat?”

Steve swallows. “Bucky, uh. He went back under. Into cryofreeze.”

“Oh.”

Steve tries to smile, but it doesn’t work. He shrugs instead.

“He thought it’d be safer,” Steve explains.

“Right.”

Steve scrubs at an imaginary spot of dirt on his palm.

“Hey.” Sam nudges Steve’s arm with his elbow, and Steve looks up. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” says Steve immediately. “Yeah, Sam. I’m fine. I’m not the one who just got out of prison.”

Sam narrows his eyes, studies Steve’s face. “No offense, dude, but you look like shit. Were the other Winter Soldiers that bad?”

“Oh. Uh, no. They weren’t—it wasn’t them. It was, uh—”

“That, my friend, is the work of Tony Stark,” T’Challa interjects from the front of the jet. “It looked far worse yesterday.”

 _“Tony_ did this?” Sam is suddenly fuming. “Goddammit. God _damn_ it. I told him, I fucking said—didn’t I fucking say that?—and he just went and—Jesus. _Jesus._ Steve. I’m so sorry. I gave you up, it was me, but he said he believed us, that he wanted to help—I’m sorry. I swear, if I’d known—”

“No, Sam, it’s—God. It’s not your fault. He—he was there to help. He just...” Steve falters. Scrubs a hand through his hair. Murmurs, “He had a good reason.”

Steve can see, out of the corner of his eye, the way Sam’s hand clenches into a fist. “I’ll kill him,” Sam breathes. “Jesus. I’ll _fucking_ kill him.”

“Sam,” Steve pleads.

“What was the reason?”

The question startles Steve. He looks up—it was Clint who spoke. He’s watching Steve now from across the jet, waiting.

Steve opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens it again. “It was... something Bucky did. Was made to do. A long time ago. He... It wasn’t something Tony could forgive.”

Clint’s brow furrows, and then, an instant later, clears. Recognition dawns on his face. He stares at Steve.

“...Fuck,” is all Clint seems able to say.

“What?” Scott looks back and forth between Steve and Clint. “What? What is it? What?”

“Steve, that asshole _lied_ to me,” Sam presses. “He lied to me, and he betrayed you. What could possibly justify that?”

A bitter huff of laughter hisses from Steve’s lungs. “Tony’s not the traitor here, Sam.”

“What do you mean?”

Steve clenches his teeth, averts his eyes. Distantly, he feels an asthma he no longer suffers from sinking its claws into his throat.

“I mean...” He stops. Starts again. “Did you ever wonder exactly what happened to Tony’s parents?”

Sam looks thrown. “Uh, no? They died in a car crash, didn’t—”

He stops in his tracks. His eyes go wide. He just looks at Steve, and Steve looks back, feeling wretched.

“...Fuck,” Sam breathes.

“What? What am I missing?” Scott stage-whispers to Clint. Clint just gives him a look.

Sam asks Steve quietly, “Did you know?” Steve shuts his eyes against the words, a strangely protracted echo. He nods once.

The air whooshes past Steve’s face as Sam sits back, cursing under his breath.

“What _is_ it?” Scott insists, none too quietly. There’s a rustle, a whisper, and then Scott says, “Oh. _Oh._ Fuck.”

“He would’ve killed him,” Steve finds himself whispering. “Tony. He would’ve killed him. He—he almost—”

The words fall apart in his mouth. Sam’s hand finds his shoulder and squeezes.

“Captain.”

It’s T’Challa’s voice again. Steve looks up; the King has handed the jet off to one of his bodyguards, and now crosses back toward Steve and Sam. He stops a few feet in front of them.

“Barnes is far from innocent,” T’Challa says, looking Steve right in the eye, “but neither is he entirely guilty. He did not deserve the fate Stark wished to visit upon him.”

Sam joins in. “Yeah, Steve, y’know, I still don’t really trust the guy, but I don’t think he deserves to be punished without a fair trial.”

“No,” Steve agrees. “No. He doesn’t.”

Sam jostles Steve with the hand still on his shoulder. “You did the right thing, protecting him,” he says.

T’Challa nods. “His mind is not his own. He needs time to make it so. Only then can we begin to determine guilt.”

The King steps closer, places a hand on Steve’s other shoulder.

“It is not a crime to save a friend,” says T’Challa gently.

Steve stares up at him just a second too long before nodding, breaking eye contact. T’Challa, seemingly satisfied, removes his hand from Steve’s shoulder and turns to check on Wanda and the medic.

Sam removes his hand, too, with one last companionable squeeze. “So, then, we need to find a way to make Grumpy Cat stop being grumpy, huh?”

“Yeah. Uh, the words—the trigger words, the ones Hydra put in his head. We need to get them out.”

“Great. And how exactly do we do that?”

Steve sighs. “I have no idea.”

After a frustrated beat, Sam turns to Clint, asks him if he has any special insights on brainwashing, and this sparks a group strategy session about possible tactics for scrubbing away Bucky’s trigger words. Steve phases out of the conversation, his mind drifting back to snow and ice.

He knows protecting Bucky was the right thing to do. He knows that. He’s never been more sure of anything in his life. And it’s that certainty that gives Steve pause: he remembers how quickly it slotted into place, how he had committed to fighting Tony even before Tony had fully committed to fighting him; he remembers how much emotion it stirred up in him, how much desperation, his protectiveness verging on animosity, on hatred; and he remembers just how far that hatred drove him. How hard he fought. How little he held back.

Steve knows protecting Bucky was the right thing to do. But he also feels the cold stone beneath his knees, the weight of the shield in his upraised hands; he sees again his one-time friend lying prostrate before him, unmasked, vulnerable, and he feels again, and again, and over and over, with chilling certainty, the truth.

Tony hadn’t been the only one prepared to kill.

 

*~*~*

 

Natasha turns up at the palace the next day. Or, more accurately, very, very late that night.

Steve wakes at the sound of Clint’s yelp (he may be bone-tired, but Steve never could sleep through a scream). He bounds the few feet to Clint’s room, Sam rushing in from the other direction, and they bust through the door just as T’Challa rounds the corner down the hall. At the sight that greets them, Steve relaxes immediately: her face is obscured, buried in Clint’s shoulder, but an unmistakable smudge of red hair peeks out of Clint’s heartfelt embrace.

“Boy, am I glad to see you,” Clint’s mumbling into Natasha’s hair.

When her face does emerge, and Nat catches sight of her audience in the doorway, for an instant she appears acutely embarrassed. She recovers quickly, stepping away from Clint and creating a respectable distance between them, her face relaxing into a familiar supercilious blankness. The window hangs open behind them; Clint takes a moment to shut it.

“Mornin’, boys.” Nat snaps off a lazy salute.

“Oh, my god. You could at least wait for the _sun_ to rise,” Sam bitches, though it’s clear in his voice he doesn’t really mean it. Steve can’t bring himself to speak.

“Is there something wrong with my front door?” Steve feels T’Challa looming quietly behind him and Sam in the doorway, his voice a soft rumble that nonetheless fills every corner of the room.

Returning T’Challa’s gaze over Steve’s shoulder, Nat shrugs. “Wasn’t sure if you’d still be mad at me after Leipzig.”

“Breaking and entering is a poor way to ask forgiveness,” remarks T’Challa mildly.

“I’ll take the fact that you haven’t thrown me back out the window as evidence that you’re over it.”

T’Challa hums his agreement. “With the wisdom of context, I can admit to some understanding of your position. But it is not a risk I would take again if I were you.”

Natasha nods, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Noted. Thank you, Your Highness.”

Clint pouts at her. “Hey, how come you didn’t ask for my forgiveness?”

Nat quirks an eyebrow. “Did I need to?”

“Well, no, but that’s not the point.”

“I kinda think it is.”

Nat’s laughing eyes land on Sam then. The laughter in them fades.

Her voice gentles as she asks, “How’s Wanda doing?”

Sam’s initial silence is telling. “Bad,” he says honestly. “They really did a number on her in there. But the doctors here are the best I’ve ever seen—it’ll take a little while, but she’ll pull through. Gonna need her friends when she wakes up.”

“We’ll be here,” says Steve, the words solid in his throat, grounding. It draws Nat’s attention to him.

Nat’s eyes are sharp, her gaze penetrating, and Steve resists the urge to flinch away from the intensity he finds there. Bypassing any comment on the yellowing bruises still gracing his face, or indeed any inquiry into his well-being, she asks knowingly, “How’s Barnes?”

Steve’s jaw tightens. “Fine,” he says. “Went back into cryo.”

She nods, like she already knew the answer to her question and was just waiting for Steve to confirm it. “I heard about Siberia,” she says, and stops there, but it’s still enough to make Steve’s throat tighten.

“Yeah,” is all he can say in return. He finally gives in and averts his gaze.

Natasha takes two quiet steps toward him, the red of her hair setting fire to the periphery of Steve’s vision. He looks up just enough so his eyes once again meet hers. Knows she can see too much there.

“Tony’s fine, too,” she murmurs. “A little worse for wear, but he’s not alone. He’ll be okay, Steve.”

Steve nods his head, eyes stinging.

A tiny, comforting smile, and then Natasha looks away, leaning down to pick something up off the floor. Holding it out to Steve, she says, “Little birdie told me you might want this.”

“Hey!” Sam barks. “Who you callin’ little?”

“Well I _was_ referring to Redwing, but sure, you can be the little birdie if you want. All you had to do was ask nicely.”

“Now that’s just rude.”

Steve’s speechless again. He wraps stiff fingers around the backpack Nat holds out to him, lifts it gingerly, his breath caught short in a wave of unanticipated reverence. It’s such an innocuous thing. It looks just like any other backpack. But it’s not. Steve’s only seen it once before, but he’d know it anywhere.

“How’d you...?” Steve can’t finish the sentence. Can’t tear his eyes from the pack in his hands.

“Let’s just say I’ve got a friend who knew where to look,” says Nat. “Actually, you might know her—tall? Blonde? Gorgeous?”

Steve feels his face redden, an obscure tendril of guilt curling in his belly.

He sidesteps the quip, and the inquisitive edge in Natasha’s gaze, and tells her sincerely, “Thank you.”

She shrugs with one shoulder. “Don’t worry about it.”

Clint moves then, stretches his arms high above his head, mouth gaping around a yawn. “Alright,” he says, the beginning of the word swelling around the end of the yawn as he lowers his arms again, “enough with the love-in. Happy though I am to see you, Nat, I need my beauty sleep.”

“Really? You think there’s any coming back from that mug?”

Clint clutches his chest, face crumpling in fake anguish. “That hurts, man.”

“Yeah, looks like it’s been hurting for a while.”

_“Ouch.”_

“I gotta agree with Birdman here,” says Sam. “Time for bed. Part two.”

“Who’re you callin’ Birdman, Birdman,” Clint mutters.

“The room across from this one is unoccupied,” T’Challa tells Nat.

“Lovely.” Natasha presses past Steve and into the hallway, and everyone but Clint follows. “Hey, Your Highness, tell me something—what’s it like having a cat and two birds under the same roof? Tense?”

Clint’s door slams pointedly behind them.

Natasha’s chuckling as she opens the door to the offered room. In the doorway, she swivels to face her entourage one more time.

“Goodnight, boys,” she says. Then her eyes land on Steve in particular as she adds, “Get some rest.”

“Oh, sure, you say that _now,”_ gripes Sam as her door falls shut.

Sam claps a hand on Steve’s arm on his way back to his own room, looking significantly at Steve, but not saying anything. T’Challa offers them a cordial farewell. Steve returns both gestures numbly, fingers coiling unconsciously around the backpack in his hands.

In the solitude of Steve’s own borrowed bedroom, the silence is deafening. A few tense breaths after the door clicks shut, he looks down at his white knuckles, the precious object framed between them.

He won’t be getting any more rest tonight.

Steve doesn’t open it up immediately. Can hardly even look at it at first—he sits it on the desk chair, sits himself on the bed, and just stares at it from afar for a good twenty minutes, his mind reeling. He shouldn’t get his hopes up, he knows, but Steve thinks maybe this is it—everything, everything he’s wanted for the past two years, every answer to every question he could think to ask. Where was he? How was he? How much does he remember?

The only thing missing is the man himself. His warmth. His steady pulse. Those are far away. But maybe, Steve thinks, reckless, desperate, maybe something in this backpack can help bring Bucky back for good.

It’s this thought that spurs Steve forward. He grabs the backpack off the chair again and sinks to the floor with it, pretending like he’s still small enough to hide away from the world if he sidles up close enough to the bed. Fingers pinched white around the zipper, he pauses to will his heartbeat down. It still flutters noisily beside his throat when he moves again, but Steve can’t wait any longer, not for this. He spares a moment for a silent apology to the sleeping Bucky, unsure how he’d feel about the breach of privacy (unsure of where he stands with Bucky now, after everything)... but then the backpack is open, and every other thought flies from Steve’s head.

Notebooks. Four or five of them, leatherbound, all muted, unassuming colors, some with little sticky tabs protruding from between the pages. They’re buried beneath a few crumpled shirts, a pair of faded jeans, an envelope containing a small stack of Romanian leu; after pulling all of this out and arraying it painstakingly on the floor before him, Steve finds a handful of pens floating around at the bottom of the bag, at least eight distinct colors of ink between them. He lays the pens carefully beside the stack of notebooks, which he’s positioned front and center.

Steve stares around at it all, all the meager evidence of the last two years of Bucky’s life. His chest is so full and frenzied he’s reminded of the one time he went into anaphylactic shock. He lays a hand on the first notebook. Soaks in the smooth texture of the leather, worn with use. Swallows thickly. Picks it up.

The notebook falls open in Steve’s lap, the spine crackling. The page before him is a mess of colors and lines; there’s writing down both pages, big dense blocks of it in black ink, and filling up the margins, arcing between lines, darting between words, are countless arrows and doodles and extra notations in a slew of different colors. It looks just like Steve remembers Bucky’s English assignments used to look in school. He’s annotated his own memories like a Shakespeare play.

And they are Bucky’s memories. Steve can tell that much instantly. He runs his fingertips over the words as something slides home in his chest, and something else wrenches free.

 

_I remember he used to get sick in the winter. Once upon a time, his lungs were just too weak to bear the cold, and he wouldn’t stop coughing all the way from September to March. It got real bad sometimes—there were times he couldn’t quite get a full breath, and he’d be lying on the couch all pathetic, and he’d look at me, and I’d see the panic in his eyes. He tried to bury it under all that stupid bravado, but turns out it’s kinda hard to stay stubborn when you’re coughing up blood. I stayed over most those nights. All of them, after his ma passed. I insisted. He’d kick up a fuss, but he always gave in eventually. I think we both knew how much he needed the company._

_Jesus, the way his ma went, we were lucky he didn’t get TB. He would’ve gone with her._

 

Steve shuts his eyes against the stinging. Holds himself deathly still until he’s got his breathing under control again. God, but it sounds just like him. Just like he was.

 

_He got so damn sick in the winter, but dammit if he didn’t love the snow. I guess I liked it, too. I liked the quiet. New York was never so quiet as when it snowed, like that beautiful insomniac of a city had finally fallen asleep for a while. He’d sit and sketch it if he felt good enough—god, how many pages of his sketchbooks were just the same old grubby streets covered in white? I remember once he told me he liked the light. He said it was like the snow took the light and held it, carried it around, and then threw it back into the world, and it made the streets look clear and full. He said he was always trying to capture that light with his pencil. Couldn’t quite get it. But then, my Stevie never did learn how to give up._

 

Steve snaps the book shut, hard, and rises to his feet.

Before he’s even fully made the decision to go, Steve’s swiftly but silently exiting his room, turning left down the hall. He foregoes the shiny elevator in favor of the shiny stairs, too antsy to consider standing still for even a few moments. He vaults up nine flights, and as he keys in his access code outside the door to the correct floor, the notebook slips around between his sweaty fingers—sweaty not from exertion, but from adrenaline. The indicator light on the door turns green, and he bursts none-too-quietly through, knowing there’s no one for him to wake on this floor.

Well, almost no one.

Steve careens down the hall and into the right room, barely stopping himself with a hand on the doorjamb. The sky outside is black, so black it’s almost turning gray, speckled with fading stars Steve can’t see. He makes out the vague outline of Bucky’s face, thrown into relief by the honey-colored lights of sleek, futuristic machines.

Bucky’s there. He’s right there.

Steve makes his way over to those machines, keying in the sequence T’Challa showed him (god, was it only days ago?). There’s a hiss as warm air fills the compartment, fogging the glass, obscuring Bucky’s face; the glass recedes, disappearing into a slot above Bucky’s head, and as Steve watches, Bucky’s eyes flutter open.

Lord almighty. Were his eyes always so blue?

Bucky swallows, visibly struggling with the maneuver. His gaze is foggy, too, but as it focuses on Steve, it starts to clear. Bucky’s brow furrows.

“...Steve?” The word is raked against the ragged surface of Bucky’s throat. Steve thinks he’s never heard anything so beautiful.

He jumps into action at the sound, stops by the sink set into a nearby wall, picks up a glass off the counter and fills it with water. He tucks the notebook under his arm and cradles the glass in his hands as he approaches his long-missed friend.

“Hey, Buck,” murmurs Steve, offering him the glass. “How’re you feeling?”

“Steve, what...” Bucky ignores the proffered water, eyes roaming wildly. He’s gone from confused to outright petrified in about five seconds.

Steve searches quickly for a place to set the glass down, settles it and the notebook on a little cart littered with expensive-looking instruments. He drags a nearby stool over to Bucky’s side, sits on it, and leans in quickly again, lays a hand on Bucky’s arm, steadying him.

“Hey, hey, you’re alright. Everything’s fine. Just breathe,” he tells Bucky, impressed with the clarity of his own voice. He has to consciously stop his hand from shaking where it connects with Bucky’s flesh, his warmth, his steady pulse. Steve’s breath comes to him a bit uneven.

Bucky does as Steve asks. He fixes his eye on a point directly ahead, no part of him moving except his chest, rising and falling at an ever slower rate. Steve’s gaze alights on the stump of Bucky’s left arm. He chokes down a wave of nauseous grief, guilt.

Interminable seconds later, when his breath has slowed to a veritable crawl, Bucky screws his eyes shut, lets his head thunk back against the padded cryobed.

“Why did you wake me?” he hisses, his face flickering between anger and terror and some kind of desperation. Steve squeezes his arm tighter.

“I, uh...” Steve falters, realizes he doesn’t have a good answer to this question. “I found your notebooks,” he says, gesturing to the one on the cart, maybe an answer, maybe a distraction.

Whatever it is, it works. Bucky opens his eyes again, flicks them over the notebook, then fixes them, hard, on Steve’s face.

Steve takes the obvious hint and keeps talking. “Natasha got here just a little while ago. Brought your backpack with her. I wasn’t sure... but, well, I. I couldn’t help it. I had to... to know. Something. Anything.”

He’s approaching the ledge. He feels it. He forces himself down from it.

“You may not have wanted me to look, and I’m sorry for that. I didn’t see much, if you’re... But I thought, I don’t know, maybe something in there can help us. To get rid of the words. I was just, I don’t know, looking for clues.”

Bucky blinks. “And you thought you’d find them in my backpack?” he asks, incredulous.

Steve ducks his head. “Sounds a little stupid, I guess. But it’s something, y’know? And I...” _I need you back,_ he can’t say.

Bucky sighs, extracts his arm carefully from Steve’s grip. Steve tries not to feel hurt by his retreat.

“Listen, I guess I don’t... I don’t mind, if you look through them,” Bucky mumbles. “But I don’t want you getting your hopes up, okay? There may not...” He grimaces. “There may not be a cure.”

Steve just shakes his head, sits back. “I can’t think like that, Buck. I won’t. There’s gotta be a way to give you your life back, and I’m gonna find it.”

Bucky just stares at him, eyes wide and too-bright. He looks almost _surprised,_ like he’d somehow forgotten what it was like to have a friend like Steve.

Steve can feel the personal challenge there, feels himself rising to meet it. He reaches out again and takes Bucky’s hand in both of his, grip firm.

“You never thought that way about me, right?” he tries. “You never gave up on me, not once, not even after the doctors told you there was no way I’d recover. Remember? They’d say it every January, like clockwork.”

Bucky’s face breaks into a small, surprised smile. He laughs softly. “Yeah. God, it was like they _wanted_ you to kick the bucket.”

In the face of Bucky’s mirth, Steve can’t help his answering smile. “But you never let me,” he says, heart in his throat.

Bucky’s smile dims, and he shrugs. “Nah. _You_ never let you. Stubborn Steve Rogers. You never went anywhere you didn’t want to go.”

Steve squeezes Bucky’s hand. “I couldn’t’ve stuck it to ‘em so many times without you,” he insists.

Bucky closes his eyes again, and the breath huffs, sharp, from his nose. It’s barely a laugh, barely happy, but Steve drinks it in. Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand right back, and he drinks that in, too. Drowns in the feeling.

The smile falls from Bucky’s face. His eyes open again, slowly, and the look he gives Steve is inscrutable.

“Listen... You look for your answers,” Bucky says, “but till you find ‘em, you gotta let me sleep. Okay? It’s not safe, me bein’ around you. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Steve’s jaw tightens, breath coming short. His hands tighten around Bucky’s.

“Okay,” he agrees, even though everything in him is screaming for him to say no.

Steve thinks Bucky can see some measure of his anguish on his face, because he pulls his hand from Steve’s grip and raises it, rubs the furrow from Steve’s brow with his thumb.

“You’ll be alright,” he tells Steve, fingertips tracing his jaw. “You’ll be alright without me.”

Bucky lets go, and Steve steps away. His hands punch in the freeze sequence without his telling them to, and Bucky gets that same relieved look on his face as he goes back under. The hiss of the cryochamber fades into silence, and Bucky’s voice reverberates in Steve’s head.

_You’ll be alright without me._

Steve dumps the untouched glass of water, grips Bucky’s notebook, and leaves the room, knowing that he won’t be.


	2. When I wake up, I'm afraid somebody else might take my place.

Tony’s staring at the letter again.

He doesn’t mean to. Christ, it shouldn’t even—he left it on the desk because he had to rush off and help Ross with the whole superpeople-breaking-out-of-superprison problem (much as he loves to put on a show of keeping the guy waiting, he gets the distinct impression that Ross has him standing on very thin ice), and when he got back, the damn thing was just... sitting there. Looking at him. He can practically feel Rogers’ pathetic puppy-dog stare bleeding through the paper.

He’s just too lazy to put the thing away. That’s all. Where do you even store a half-assed apology letter from a one-time friend? Under S for Sad Face? Tony can hardly bring himself to look at the thing, if he’s honest. Just leaves it sitting on the corner of his desk most of the time, ignored, giving off noxious waves of patriotic loneliness.

But he’s staring at it now. Now, he can’t look away. Can’t stop picturing the man who wrote it, put pen to paper and came up with something so disgustingly sincere. Can’t stop holding that man up against the man in that Siberian bunker, the one crouched over him, brandishing a sleek vibranium shield like a caveman brandishes a rock, a flash of murder in his eyes.

And Tony can’t stop picturing the man who inspired such frightening change in his friend... and in him, too. He can admit to it as long as nobody else is around to hear.

James Buchanan Barnes. _Bucky,_ Tony thinks, and resists the urge to spit. Who knew the fucking puppy-dog look was so contagious.

Before he knows it, Tony’s touching the letter again for the first time since he let it drop to the cold hard surface of the desk, days ago now. He picks it up, scans a line here, a word there _(promise... I’ll be there... I’m sorry),_ and his grip tightens until the words start to disappear into the haphazard pattern of folds, so much sand slipping through the cracks. Tony watches the words melt away, and then he yanks open a drawer—any drawer, god, it doesn’t _matter,_ just—and... he hesitates.

_Family,_ it says in an artist’s scrawl.

Tony throws the letter down, kicks the drawer viciously shut. He staunchly ignores the minute quaver in his hand as he sweeps from the room.

The letter sits once more atop the desk, crumpled but whole. 

 

*~*~*

 

“Let’s see, what else... Well, the coffee here is great. T’Challa says they grow the beans just a few miles away, roast them right here in the kitchens. You’d probably faint if you tried it. I know how much you always loved coffee—god, even that swill they had at the front. You remember that? Like drinking acid.”

Steve’s rambling is met with silence. Not that he expected any different. He sits at Bucky’s bedside, the curved glass of the cryochamber distorting the shape of Bucky’s restful face. Steve’s fingers drift over the glass, unthinking, adding to the array of fingerprints already smudged there.

“Coffee’s different nowadays—but you probably know that. Or maybe not. I don’t know how they do it in Romania. But if it’s anything like the States, then it’s complicated as hell.” Steve laughs to himself. There’s little mirth in it. “They do all this fancy stuff with milk and sugar and flavor, and sometimes they put whipped cream on your drink, like a goddamn dessert. Although there’s something called an americano now that you might recognize—remember the espresso in Italy? How strong it was? You always asked for it to be watered down—god, they looked at you so funny for that, like it was blasphemy even suggesting it. But I guess you weren’t the only soldier to order your espresso that way. Us American boys got used to our weak coffee. And now it’s a whole thing, watered-down espresso, and they call it an americano, to poke fun at us I guess. It’s pretty good though.”

Steve flattens his palm on the glass, blinks quickly, and wills himself to smile.

“I’ll have to buy you one sometime,” he says, throat tight. “And y’know what, I’ll get you one of those fancy sugary ones, too. You always did have a sweet tooth, even if you refused to admit it. I’ll get you a sweet coffee when you wake up. Whipped cream and all.”

Steve’s face crumples before he can do anything about it. His hand coils into a fist atop the glass. “Jesus, Buck...” His fist trembles.

Steve takes one sharp breath in, and then schools his face, swiping haphazardly at the moisture on his cheeks. He gets to his feet and leaves Bucky to his slumber.

He goes back to his research. Steve’s taken to holing up in his room, camping out on the floor with Bucky’s notebooks spread in an arc around him, just... reading. Reliving, in some cases. Recoiling in others. Some days, he’s calm about it, reading for an hour here or there, and in the interim, catching up with Nat, sparring with Sam, checking in with T’Challa. Some days he can hardly look at the writing on those pages, jagged and tortured, or else sickeningly neat, matter-of-fact, evoking demons and horrors and carnage in brutally clinical language; on those days, he wanders the palace alone, haunting its hallways, its humid jungle grounds. Avoiding his friends.

And then there are days like this one: days when he consumes Bucky’s memories voraciously, like a man starved, like an addict, not even stopping for meals. Days when his back aches and his legs go numb from sitting in the same stiff position on the same hard floor, reading and rereading the same fraught passages over and over again.

This one Steve remembers himself, vividly. It was just a few days before the train.

 

_He brought me coffee in my tent that day. He did that a lot, during the war, taking care of me almost like I was sick—and maybe I was, now I think about it. But he didn’t know that. He couldn’t have known that. I think he was just reacting to the overall feeling of exhaustion in the group. Jesus, we were all so tired. Even Dum-Dum was dragging his feet by the end. Coffee was a temporary solution, and a bad one at that. Like bandaging a gunshot wound to the gut. We knew we were dying, but we pretended like we could fight it. Pretended like there was something we could do._

_Then again, I don’t think he was pretending. There was something in his eyes, all the time, burning long after the firewood ran out. There’s a word, one of the nuns taught it to me back in school—indefatigable. That was him. My Steve._

_So he brought me coffee. I remember thinking how strange it looked, him doing something to take care of me. I was so used to taking care of him, after all, and not that he wouldn’t have brought me breakfast in bed back in Brooklyn, it’s just never the way things shook out. Plus, he was so big by that point, and it always looks funny when someone that big and brauny and bright does something so small and kind for someone else. God, I still wasn’t used to how big he was, even then. And I don’t think he was used to it, either, because he still walked around with a hunch in his shoulders, like he wasn’t allowed to take up space. It was almost worse after the serum, since he was taking up so much more space, literally and figuratively. Only time he ever looked comfortable in his own skin was on the battlefield._

_The thing of it was, for all that he believed in what we were doing, he hated the war. We talked about it that morning—he brought me my coffee, brought his own, too, and the measly rations Uncle Sam had allotted for our breakfast. We sat across from each other on the dirt floor, eating, drinking, watching each other. I remember inspecting him for injuries. He’d taken some pretty heavy damage the day before, but by that point it was just a few mostly-healed cuts and fading bruises. I remember I wanted to reach out and touch the ones on his cheek, like if I touched them gentle enough I could rub them away. That’s not a bruise, I remember thinking, delirious, that’s just charcoal. He’s been sketching again, I thought, though he hadn’t touched a pencil in months._

_After a while, he got this tight look on his face. I remember it, because right afterwards he did the thing I’d been willing myself not to, and he reached out and he touched my neck, so fucking gentle. He shot me an unconvincing smile and said something about how I was healing nicely—I’d gotten beat up pretty bad myself, and looking back on it, I think it did heal a bit faster than it should have. Makes sense, now._

_But Steve clearly didn’t want to talk about how I was healing. His face got all stormy, and he dropped his hand and he looked away and he said in this tiny, horrible voice, “I’m sorry.” Jesus Christ, I’ll never forget the sound._

_Oddly, I remember laughing. Why did I laugh? I guess I thought it was funny, him apologizing when I was the one with so much to apologize for._

_“What in the world are you sorry for?” I remember asking._

_“You were protecting me,” he said. “You got hurt because of me.”_

_I can still feel the smile I had, wide, tight, in some way false, but in another way so goddamn sincere. “Steve,” I said to him, “what am I here for, if not to protect you?”_

_God, his eyes. Sometimes, if it was quiet enough, if we were alone, I could just make out the glint of green in the blue there. Steve looked at me then, and it was like—it was like that picture they took of the Earth from Apollo 17, the Blue Marble. There was a whole world in the blue-green of Steve’s eyes._

_“I hate this,” he hissed when he looked away._

_“Hate what?” I asked when I remembered how to breathe._

_“This,” he said. “The war. I mean, I don’t—I get why we’re doing it. This is a fight that needs to be fought, and I’m glad to do it. But sometimes, I just...” And his voice got all quiet, and he looked at me, almost guilty, and he said, “Sometimes I wish we didn’t have to fight at all.”_

_I looked at him then, at what he’d become, at all the things war had done to the man I knew—I looked at him then, and I couldn’t tell him how goddamn much I agreed._

 

Steve sets the book down only when his vision blurs too much to make out the words.

 

*~*~*

 

Natasha finds him after nightfall.

“Hey,” she says softly, nudging open the door. “I brought you some food.”

She’s brought one of the cooks’ hot, gourmet meals with her. It smells delicious. It turns Steve’s stomach.

Natasha edges into the room and joins Steve on the floor, setting the plate of food between them. Steve looks at it, but doesn’t touch it.

Nat sighs. “Come on, Steve. You can’t keep this up.”

“Keep what up?” Steve’s voice is light. It fools no one.

_“This.”_ Nat gestures at the notebooks splayed on the floor, at Steve’s hunched shoulders, at his face, which he knows is haggard. “This obsession, this... I know you care about him, Steve, and you want to get him back. But he cares about you, too, doesn’t he? He wouldn’t want you to do this to yourself, would he?”

Steve shuts his eyes. “No. He... he wouldn’t.”

He opens his eyes and finds Nat’s. She’s watching him, wide-eyed, searching, caring. Vulnerable. He picks up the plate of food.

When Steve starts to eat, Natasha visibly relaxes.

“How’s it going, anyway?” she asks. “You find anything useful yet?”

Steve concentrates on eating, even though each bite feels like swallowing a lump of coal. Between one bite and the next, he admits, “I’m not even sure what I should be looking for.”

“Well,” Nat says, “you said it was words, right? That Hydra had a set of words they used to control him? Do you know what they are? Usually, they’ll pick words that have some kind of emotional resonance, something that holds some power for the person they’re trying to control. That’d be a good place to start.”

Steve carefully doesn’t ask how she knows that. Instead, he gestures toward one of the books on the ground—it’s different from the rest, faded red leather, a graying star pressed into the cover.

“Zemo had that one on him in Siberia,” says Steve. He doesn’t mention how they found it—how it was just sitting on the ground somewhere, innocuous, on their way out of the bunker; how Bucky’s eyes picked it immediately out of the shadows, and even half-unconscious and relying almost entirely on Steve to stay upright, he still managed to drag the both of them over and pick it up. He doesn’t mention the raw look in Bucky’s eyes as he tucked the little book out of sight.

“Seems like it’s some kind of instruction manual,” Steve tells Natasha, shaking off the memory. “But I can’t read any of it—it’s all in Russian.”

Nat leans over and picks up the red book, opens to the first page. “‘Entry code, main door,’” she reads, “‘Seven, one, two, eight, six.’”

Steve’s mouth hangs slack.

“You could have just asked, y’know,” Nat teases, eyes alight.

_“Fuck,”_ Steve breathes. “I can’t believe I didn’t—I mean, you’re—and I— _fuck.”_

Natasha pats his arm. “Eat,” she says, and picks up one of Bucky’s pens.

Steve eats, but it gets more and more difficult, his stomach filling with anxious butterflies as Natasha flips through the red book, scanning each page briefly before turning to the next. She holds the pen—green, Steve notes absently—between lax fingers, but doesn’t use it until she stops on a page in the middle of the book, emitting a triumphant _“Gotcha.”_

She scans the page, writes a bit, scans again, writes again. Steve stops being able to taste his food. But he keeps eating, and when his plate is clear, he sets it aside and waits for Natasha to finish.

After an absolutely torturous few minutes, Natasha lifts the pen and looks back over her work one more time. And then finally, _finally,_ she hands the book back to Steve.

“The translations aren’t perfect,” she says, “but I did my best.”

Steve’s heart lodges itself in his throat, throbs distantly. He glances over the familiar patterns of faded black ink (he’s been through this one a thousand times, too, useless as it was) and then at the new green markings in the margins.

_Longing,_ the green ink tells him. _Rusted. Seventeen._

“Thank you,” Steve tells Natasha, breathless. _Daybreak. Furnace._

“No problem,” Nat replies. _Nine. Benign._ She stays by his side, silent, while he reads.

_Homecoming,_ it says. Steve traces the words with his fingertips. _One._

And then Steve’s heart _stops._

“Is this right?” he demands, shoving the book back at Natasha, pointing to the last of the words with shaky hands.

“What?” Nat seems alarmed. She tears her eyes from Steve’s face—and he knows, god, he _knows_ he must look crazy, but—“‘Freight car,’” she reads. “Yeah, I thought that was weird, too. I don’t know why that would be there.”

Steve exhales, quick and sharp. “I do.”

“You—wait, _what?_ Steve, hang on,” but Steve’s already taking the notebook back, scrambling to his feet.

“I need to—” he flails, backing away. “Thanks for dinner,” he manages, and then turns and rushes out the door.

_“Steve,”_ Nat calls after him, but he’s already gone.

If possible, Bucky looks even more panicked when Steve wakes him this time. The gloom fades from his eyes and he clams up immediately, his gaze locking onto Steve.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he murmurs, frantic, and Steve realizes Bucky isn’t really seeing him, isn’t really there. _“No,”_ he says again, ragged, desperate, “Please, god, don’t—I can’t—not him, I _can’t_ —”

“Bucky.” Steve’s voice is firm. He puts his left hand on Bucky’s shoulder, the right on his hip, stopping him from scrambling over the side of the cryobed. “Bucky. _Bucky._ You’re fine. Listen. It’s just a dream, okay? You’re fine.”

Frantic eyes find his, and Steve tightens his grip, waits. Recognition dawns slowly in the blue.

“Jesus,” Bucky chokes out. “Jesus Christ, Steve.”

“You’re fine,” Steve says again, rubbing soothing circles into Bucky’s hip with his thumb. “Everything’s fine.”

Bucky exhales harshly, and it might be a sob. His hand finds Steve’s right wrist and squeezes.

They stay like that, motionless and white-knuckled, until Bucky’s got his breathing under control. Finally, Bucky unwinds his fingers from Steve’s wrist, lifts Steve’s hand carefully from his own hip. Reluctantly, Steve lets him.

Bucky closes his eyes and just breathes, in and out, for a minute or two. Steve sits back on his stool, which has taken up permanent residence beside Bucky’s cryochamber.

When Bucky opens his eyes again, they cut right through Steve.

“Why did you wake me?” he asks for the second time. He sounds angry.

This time, Steve has an answer for him. “I found something,” he says, and picks up the red notebook from where he placed it on the cart.

Bucky’s face hardens when he sees the notebook. Steve presses on.

“Natasha helped translate a page for me,” he tells Bucky. “The one with your trigger words on it.”

For a moment, Bucky looks almost frightened. The expression is gone so quick Steve’s sure he imagined it.

Steve opens the book to the right page, points to Natasha’s green-ink translation of the last word. _Freight car._ “Does that mean what I think it means?” he asks.

Bucky barely even looks at it. He’s staring at a point past the notebook when he says, “Probably.”

Steve swallows, nods. “Makes sense,” he says. “Natasha told me they would have chosen words that had some emotional resonance. Your death is pretty damn emotional.” _For both of us,_ he doesn’t say.

Bucky grimaces, still not looking at Steve. “Is that all?”

Steve wills himself not to be hurt by Bucky’s dismissal. “I wanted to ask you about some of these other words,” he says in lieu of an answer. “I thought maybe if... if you talked through them, it might, I don’t know, take away some of the words’ power. Kinda like therapy.”

Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t know, Steve—”

“Can we just—” Steve cuts in. “Can we at least give it a try?”

When Bucky looks at him this time, his gaze has softened.

“Okay, Steve,” he says. “We’ll give it a try.”

Steve knows Bucky’s just humoring him, that he doesn’t really think it’ll work, but he tells himself it doesn’t matter as long as Bucky plays along. “Can we, um.” He stops. “There’s a few couches down the hall,” he tells Bucky, and hopes he’ll understand.

Bucky just smiles. “Help me up,” he says, reaching for Steve’s hand.

Leaving that room with Bucky is a relief. Just the reminder that Bucky can exist in any place other than the place where he’s frozen, asleep, unreachable... it’s such a relief. Steve circles his fingers around Bucky’s wrist as he leads him down the hall, almost wishing Bucky needed more help to walk—wishing that he could curl in closer, snake his arm around Bucky’s waist and soak in his precious body heat. When they reach the little sitting room by the elevators, Steve leads Bucky to a couch by the window, telling himself it’s because he wants to give Bucky a chance to look outside while he can... and if it’s also the smallest couch in the room, and necessitates Steve and Bucky sitting cozy and close, well. That’s just the kind of sacrifice he’s willing to make for a friend.

They sit facing each other, each with one leg folded on the couch. Steve makes sure to sit on Bucky’s right, so Bucky can prop his arm up on the back of the couch if he wants to. And he does—he drapes his arm over the couch and stares out the window behind them, taking in the swirling expanse of night-drenched jungle green.

“Wow,” Bucky breathes when his shining eyes alight on the tapestry of stars above them, so thick and bright it feels like it’s pressing them down into the earth. Steve stares at Bucky’s profile in the starlight, and silently agrees. _Wow._

Then those shining eyes land on him, and Steve wants to kiss Bucky so much it hurts.

“So,” Bucky says, soft, like he’s afraid to disturb the quiet, “you had some questions for me?”

Steve blinks, coughs. “Right.” He looks down at the red notebook in his lap. Bucky looks down at it, too, and the light in his eyes dims.

Steve opens the book again to the page with Natasha’s green lettering, then, after a moment’s thought, hands the book over to Bucky. Bucky cradles it hesitantly in his lap, stabilizing it with his right hand.

“So we know what ‘freight car’ probably refers to,” Steve says. He knows that, for this little exercise, he should ask Bucky to talk about the train, but he can’t bring himself to do that. Can’t bring himself to live that again. So instead, he asks, “Anything else jog your memory?”

Bucky purses his lips as he stares down at the words, tracing them with his fingertips as Steve had done not too long ago. His hand stops on the third one from the bottom.

“‘возвращение на родину,’” he reads, and doesn’t even look at Natasha’s translation when he says, “Homecoming.”

Steve resists the urge to shiver at the ice in Bucky’s voice. “Made me think of the war,” Steve admits. “We always talked about what we’d do when we came home.”

Bucky smiles, slow and delighted. “The Grand Canyon,” he remembers. “I still haven’t been.”

“Me either.” Steve smiles, too. He can’t help it.

Bucky’s staring down at the words. His face falls as he does it, and then he flattens his palm across the page, blocking the words from view.

“The war...” he murmurs. “Yeah. I think... the first time I thought about coming home was on the boat ride over. We’d barely even made it out of the harbor.” He chuckles mirthlessly. “I could still see the city, just barely, and I just... I missed it already. I remember my hands were covered in rust by the time I made it down to my bunk that night. Hadn’t been able to see the city for hours, but I just stood there hangin’ onto the railing, starin’ behind me like if I looked long enough I’d be there again. I’d be...” Bucky’s eyes flicker up to Steve, and then away, out into the starry night.

Steve stays silent. After a while, Bucky keeps talking. “I missed you real bad, you know,” he says, still not looking at Steve. Steve’s much more conscious of his heartbeat all of a sudden, and of his right hand, just inches from Bucky’s knee.

“I can’t tell you how many times I thought about you,” Bucky continues, “sittin’ all alone in that grimy apartment, in your little window seat, with your sketchbook... I wondered how you were doing, if you were lonely, if you were thinkin’ of me, too. I hoped you’d send me a letter or two, but. Well.” Bucky looks at Steve out of the corner of his eye. “I guess we know why you didn’t.”

Steve’s face heats. He’s about to speak—to say what, he has no idea—but then Bucky surprises him with a question.

“You still sketching, Stevie?” He asks it with this tiny smile on his face, and Steve’s heart swells to breaking point—at the smile, at the use of his old nickname. He blinks hard a few times before he answers.

“No,” says Steve. “Not really. Not since Brooklyn.”

Bucky nods, like he suspected as much. “You should,” he says. “No point wasting that kinda talent.”

Steve gives in to the urge to touch Bucky then, not trusting his voice. His hand finds Bucky’s knee and squeezes.

Bucky looks down at Steve’s hand. Stares. “I told the boys all kindsa stories about you,” he murmurs. “‘Specially after we got taken. Not much else to do in that base but talk. We all shared a good laugh about the asshole who wouldn’t stop pickin’ fights.” Bucky’s eyes find Steve’s again, and he’s smiling. “Gabe was dyin’ to meet you by the time you got there.”

The smile fades. Bucky lays his hand on Steve’s.

“They loved you,” Bucky says, urgent, his eyes like goddamn beacons, boring through Steve. He grips Steve’s hand tight. “They woulda followed you anywhere. They knew you were their best chance of gettin’ home.”

He’s still looking at Steve, his eyes wide and bright. Steve’s frozen.

Bucky looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t. For a second, that same fright from before wells up in his eyes, and Steve knows he hasn't imagined it this time. Then Bucky averts his gaze, reclaims his hand.

“I don’t think I can do this, Steve,” he says, his face framed in starlight. “I think you should put me back under.”

Steve takes his hand off Bucky’s knee before Bucky can feel it shaking.

“Okay, Buck.” _No, no, not okay, not—_ “That’s fine. Whatever you want.”

Bucky huffs a laugh, shaking his head at the stars. Steve doesn’t know what’s funny, but he doesn’t ask. Just takes the notebook back from Bucky and helps him back to his room.


	3. I've grown familiar with villains that live in my head.

Wanda drifts, her consciousness swathed in a thick, humid fog. She can’t find her body. Can’t find the bounds of it, can’t figure out where she ends and the rest of the world begins. She feels sometimes like she is everything, at other times, like she is nothing. Always, she feels vast and indistinct. Sometimes, she thinks that she hears voices, but when she tries to follow them, it’s like trying to follow headlights back to the car on a foggy night—the source is nowhere, everywhere, gone, and she sinks back under again.

She wonders if the voices are real or if they are memory. She wonders if the memories belong to her or to someone else.

Some memories she knows are not her own. There is a texture to the sound, a taste to the silence that she does not recognize. Very occasionally, there is a feeling like static electricity skipping down her spine, raising the hairs on her arms, and in these moments, she remembers her body. She absorbs fear and isolation from the outside, and it reminds her of her own.

Sometimes, the voices she hears are warm and deep, close, familiar, and Wanda strains toward them. She almost always expends all her energy in the attempt, to no avail—but today, she manages to grab hold.

“...think maybe you shouldn’t be waking him up so much, Steve,” someone is saying. “All that back-and-forth can’t be good for him.”

“I know, Sam, I just... I thought maybe if I got him to talk about it all, I could help him. I don’t know.”

“What, like therapy?”

“Yeah.”

“Steve... There’s a reason you don’t pay your friend to be your therapist. It’s a huge conflict of interest. And as close as the two of you were, or are, there might be things he’s just not comfortable talking to you about. Especially now.”

“I know. God, you’re right. I just... I don’t know what else to do.” Silence. Then, “There’s this person... this version of Bucky I keep seeing in the notebooks. He sounds like my Bucky, and he has my Bucky’s memories, but he writes like a goddamn poet and makes references to history we never lived together and talks like he’s been to hell and back, like he’s an old man. And I... I’ve never met that Bucky. I don’t know him. But... I want to. And I just, I’m... I’m worried he doesn’t want to know me.”

“Steve. Look at me.” A beat. “He wants to know you. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.”

“But he’s not, is he?” The words are rough, distorted. Wanda gets that static feeling skipping down her spine again. “He’s not here. Not really. God, I...” The sob is _awful,_ a fishhook yanking at Wanda’s throat. The voice is tiny, wretched, broken, when it says, “Why can’t I make him stay?”

“Jesus, Steve...”

Wanda gives them a minute, waits for the soft choking sounds to fade into the silence before she breaks it.

“...Steve?”

A frisson of shock meets Wanda’s ears, and then there are two sets of footsteps—one toward her, one away.

“Hey, doc! She’s awake!” Sam’s voice calls, and then Wanda hears him making his way over, too, just as Steve catches her hand in a warm, solid grip. She squirms a bit, struggling to lift her heavy eyelids.

When Wanda finally opens her eyes, there are two figures bending over her. She only makes out the blurred shapes of them at first, but she blinks slowly a few times and they come into focus.

“Hey,” says Steve. His hands are soft and firm as earth around hers, but his voice is like glass, and his eyes are shining. “Hey, kid. How are you feeling?”

Wanda looks from Steve’s face to Sam’s. They wear matching expressions of warmth and gratitude, but something haunts the space behind their eyes.

She looks back at Steve, licks her lips. “I’ve been better,” she says.

“Girl, I hope so, ‘cause you look like shit.” Sam smiles fondly. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

A dark-skinned woman in startlingly white robes presses gently past Sam then, angling for a better view of Wanda’s face.

“Welcome back to the world, Ms. Maximoff,” she says kindly, her English lightly accented. “You were asleep for quite a long time. But the rest seems to have improved your condition.”

“Where am I?” Wanda asks.

“You are in Birnin Zana, Wakanda, on the forty-sixth floor of the royal palace, being treated for your injuries in a state-of-the-art medical facility.” The woman, evidently a doctor, diverts her attention to the equipment surrounding Wanda’s bed, taking stock of its various beeps and hums and blinks as she speaks. “You and your friends are honored guests of King T’Challa.”

Wanda almost hates to ask. “My injuries...?”

The doctor looks up from the tablet she’s been perusing—an electronic medical chart, Wanda thinks—and catches Wanda’s eye. “You sustained minor injuries in your altercation at the airport in Leipzig,” she explains, “as well as more... extensive ones at the hands of your captors. The lion’s share of the damage seems to be to your nervous system. You will need to rest easy for the next few weeks until it has fully recovered.”

 _Captors._ Wanda feels her way around the word, smelling it, tasting it, seeking out its unique divots and protrusions. Then she presses down, presses _there,_ and it cracks open.

_“Just tell us where they went,” the voice says, and it is cruel but it is not cold, it sizzles with the same vicious, biting heat as the electrical charge that burrows white-hot fingers into her wrists, ankles, chest, scalp; she can smell her hair burning and she can feel herself screaming even though no sound comes out, and when she sees red she thinks at first it is anger but then she realizes it is her power, the essence of her filling the tiny box they have her in, straining at the windows and the walls as though to reach out and strangle the man with his hand on the switch. But she cannot reach him, cannot break through all that metal and glass, not with so great a piece of her curling inward in fright, and the cruel man stares down his nose at her like she is an insect, but instead of squashing her he just flips the switch, back and forth, back and forth, saying over and over that she should “just tell us, just tell us,” not even promising a reprieve from the pain because he does not intend to offer any, because he wants to see her suffer._

Wanda blinks, and the memory evaporates, her breathing even and her limbs unrestrained as though none of these things ever happened. She glances down at her wrist, the new, pink skin peeking out of Steve’s ironclad grip. For a moment, she thinks it still sizzles.

Steve tightens his grip around her hand, breaking gently into her thoughts. It is almost, Wanda thinks, like he knows where they’ve strayed—and when she meets his warm, probing gaze, she’s certain of it.

“You’re safe now,” he tells her. Implores her. “You’re safe.”

She wraps her own fingers around Steve’s in turn, and resists the urge to tell him, _So are you._

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” the doctor cuts in, pressing a discreet button on the arm of Wanda’s bed. “I must ask you to leave us for a short time. We need to administer a few more tests in order to ascertain more clearly the state Ms. Maximoff’s health.” As she speaks, two more dark-skinned, white-clad figures step softly into the room.

“No problem, doc,” Sam agrees. He lays a hand on Wanda’s head, and she meets his wide-open gaze. He smiles. “See you soon.”

Sam pulls away, but Steve doesn’t. Not until Sam lays that same hand on his shoulder, says his name so quietly Wanda wonders how Steve even hears it. But clearly he does, because a moment later he nods, blinks, clears his throat. Removes his hands.

“We’ll be back to check on you later,” he promises, and Wanda nods her assent.

Sam and Steve leave. The doctors do their work, and then they leave, too. Wanda finds herself drifting in and out of sleep—a natural sleep, now, shallow and peaceful, not the sticky, disorienting fog from before. She bobs up and down on the graceful tide of her own thoughts, and the current buffets her ever in the same direction: back, just a short ways, just far enough to reunite with the jagged edges Steve’s voice took on while her eyes were closed, to pick at them like a scab.

_Why can’t I make him stay?_

She felt Steve’s isolation while she slept. She had not exercised her telepathic abilities in a long time—not since joining the Avengers, really. The memory of her own trespass into the hidden, haunted crevasses of those she now calls friends is enough to dissuade her. But during unconsciousness, she could not stop herself from seeking out those now-familiar signatures, and what she found was largely a comfort: in Sam, in Natasha, in Clint, she found a much-needed stability, a certainty even alongside the pain of recent turmoil. But Steve was changed. Steve was... unstable. Erratic. And perhaps he does not display as much on the outside, but Wanda knows better than to fall for the image he chooses to project. He is wounded. He has been for a long time.

And somehow, it all comes back to one man. _Bucky._ The static bite of Steve’s loneliness seems to eddy around that central point—and if Wanda focuses enough, she can feel the complementary shadow of Bucky’s loneliness eddying around Steve, too. Their wounds fit together like puzzle pieces, like if only the two edges would meet, they could heal. But there is too much distance between them.

As consciousness returns to her, Wanda tastes this realization like copper in the back of her throat. It spurs her forward.

She finds her feet unsteadily, gripping the edge of the bed as she stands. It has been days, maybe weeks since she last stood on her own, and she takes it slowly, hoping to remain quiet enough that she won’t alert anyone. Luckily, Wakandan medical technology seems to have surpassed the myriad tubes and wires of the rest of the world—her life signs are monitored by a set of fibers encircling her right index finger, and she leaves the fibers in place, allowing them to continue recording her steady pulse as she slinks from her room.

For the first time in over a year, Wanda knowingly extends her conscious mind in search of another. She does not have to look far. He is almost directly above her, suspended in a frozen sleep the next floor up. She takes the stairs, not wanting to chance running into anyone in the elevator. The keypad alongside the door deters her for only a moment; she has no code with which to unlock the door, but she can sense the mechanism inside, and it is a simple matter to send an exploratory red tendril through the metal and slide the deadbolt from its home.

Her quarry sleeps alone in the late morning sun.

She approaches the cryochamber cautiously, examining the shadowy figure of the man inside. This close, Wanda can taste his tranquility, the essence of him settled squarely in the eye of a black and roiling storm. It might be the shock of finding him so vulnerable that makes Wanda hesitate; she spares a moment to acknowledge the fact that she hardly knows this man, has met him only once before and didn’t really speak to him then, either. He doesn’t know her, and he doesn’t trust her, and what she’s about to do is... there is a line.

But she thinks of the way Steve’s hands cradled hers, the warmth, the tremor there. She thinks of the wavering look in his eye, such a stark counterpoint to his fingers’ quelling certainty. She thinks of the way Steve’s soft, sonorous voice shattered around Bucky’s name, and then, inhaling sharply, Wanda crosses the line, pressing past the barrier of unconsciousness and entering Bucky’s thoughts.

 

*~*~*

 

Bucky dreams.

He dreams of Brooklyn, of sunny days and sandlots and skipping Sunday school to find the secret stairways in the bowels of the cathedral. He dreams of scabby knees and skinny limbs and stubborn lips and bruises.

He dreams of the summer Steve broke his arm. He’d gotten into a fight with Timmy Smulders because Timmy kept trying to kiss Erica Gladstone even though she told him no. Timmy’d been chasing Erica around the sandlot when Steve butted his damn nose in and clocked him one right in the eye. Gave him a real nice shiner, too—but then Timmy and his boys went to work, and little Stevie got his arm broken for his trouble. Erica, bless her heart, ran right inside to tell Mrs. Mayweather as soon as Timmy and the boys started swinging, but Bucky knew the grownups would only blame Steve for all of it, so after he wrenched Timmy’s hands off of Steve—and gave him a bruise on his right eye to match the one on his left—Bucky scooped Steve into his arms and ran.

Steve yelped and wailed and squawked at Bucky _I’m not your girlfriend, Buck, you don’t have to carry me_ but his good arm wrapped tight around Bucky’s neck as he raced down the street, and Bucky blamed the running for the way his heartbeat ratcheted up. He knew their parents would tear them both a new one for getting into another fight, but with Steve cradled against him, folding his broken arm into Bucky’s chest and stubbornly stifling his whimpers, Bucky couldn’t bring himself to care.

Bucky ran and he ran until he couldn’t run anymore, and then when Steve told him _It’s okay, Bucky, they’re not following us. I’m okay, you can slow down,_ he slowed himself to a walk, struggling to catch his breath.

It takes him another full block before he finds his voice.

“How’s the arm?” he asks, rearranging Steve in his grip. His own arms are getting tired, but there’s no way he’s letting go.

“It’s fine, Buck,” Steve says, jaw set, “and so are my legs. I _can_ walk, y’know.”

“Hey, kid, I remember what it feels like to break an arm. I’m not makin’ you walk anywhere.”

Steve rolls his eyes, but huddles in closer. He lays his head on Bucky’s shoulder, and something inside Bucky’s chest cracks.

Here’s how it went: Bucky carried Steve twelve whole blocks back to his ma’s apartment, where she greeted them with shock and concern and an infinitely gentle hand, berating them even as she tended to their wounds. She called Dr. Gleeson from upstairs and asked him to help, and then, when both Steve and Bucky had been seen to, Steve’s ma called Bucky’s parents to tell them that Bucky would be spending the night. The sun set, and the two boys fell asleep on top of the couch cushions in the living room, Bucky curled protectively around Steve’s broken arm.

But before any of that, Bucky walks down the street with Steve cradled in his arms, and Steve lays his head on Bucky’s shoulder, and something inside Bucky’s chest cracks.

The moment freezes. Bucky freezes it here, in the very instant he falls open before Steve, and he lives here for as long as he can. Here, he finds peace.

Here, a woman finds him. He’s met her before, he thinks, but he can’t remember where. She stands in the middle of the sidewalk about twenty feet in front of them, watching. Her hair is dark and her skin is sickly-pale and she looks very tired, but she’s staring at Bucky like he’s the answer to some puzzle she’s been struggling to solve. Bucky doesn’t so much hear it as _feel_ it when she speaks.

“So you do care.” It feels like a question, but she doesn’t say it like a question.

“Care about what?” Bucky asks, grip tightening around the boy in his arms.

Her eyes drift down, and Bucky follows her gaze—to Steve, his eyes hidden from Bucky, his hair whuffling with Bucky’s breath.

Bucky sets his jaw. He looks up again, sharp words poised on the tip of his tongue—

The words fly from his head. He blinks, stares.

The woman is gone. 

 

*~*~*

 

Steve is startled to find Wanda in Bucky’s room.

Today is a good day. The progress of Wanda’s recovery has lifted some of the weight from all of their shoulders, and since watching her eyes flutter open yesterday, Steve’s felt that much more in control. He’s spent some more time with the notebooks, hoping to find obvious connections between Bucky’s memories and the words in the red book. But he hasn’t spiraled quite so deep into the work this time. He’s been eating full meals at normal times, and even seeking out company. Scott still seems a bit starstruck by him, but T’Challa just nods companionably upon meeting his eye, Clint just seems happy to talk to him, and Natasha is clearly relieved to see him so calm after his little outburst over the words. Sam still looks at him a bit warily after their last conversation, but for the most part he seems content not to pry.

Steve took a leisurely breakfast this morning, and went back to the notebooks after. He hasn’t had much luck drawing his own connections, so he decided to try asking Bucky about the words one more time—if he says no this time, that’ll be it, he reasoned. He just can’t bring himself to leave it alone quite yet.

So he heads up to Bucky’s room, red book in hand, thinking that he might pay Wanda another visit after he talks to Bucky—only to find her standing right there next to Bucky’s cryochamber.

“Wanda?” he blurts, and the sound seems to take her by surprise. She jumps almost out of her skin, snatching her hand back from the glass and turning to face Steve.

“Steve! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, I just—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wanda,” Steve interrupts, lifting up his hands, the red book he holds in one of them somewhat marring the gesture of placation. “It’s fine. You’re not intruding.”

She looks distinctly uncomfortable at that, but doesn’t press the issue.

“What’re you doing here?” Steve asks, crossing the room toward her.

“I just—” She falters, purses her lips. “I wanted to see him. I didn’t get to talk to him much, you know, before—well. And I... I know how important he is to you. I guess I was just... curious.”

Steve stops in front of her, smiles. “Makes sense, I guess,” he says. “I do talk about him a lot, don’t I?”

Wanda visibly relaxes. “I feel like I know him already,” she agrees.

Steve feels his smile flicker at that.

“Oh, hey, you should probably—do you want to sit?” Steve flails a bit. “You must be tired still. You go ahead and take the stool there, and I’ll—” Steve casts around the room until he finds another stool. Wanda sits on the first one as he drags the second one around to the cryochamber.

The silence is a little awkward once they’re both seated. Steve tries not to stare too long at Bucky’s face through the smudges on the glass.

Wanda speaks first.

“Steve, can I ask—what are _you_ doing here?”

Steve’s a little surprised by the question; it hadn’t really occurred to him that he _shouldn’t_ be here. But he did come up here with a specific goal in mind, after all.

“Well, I...” And here, Steve has the presence of mind to feel slightly guilty, but he forges on anyway, “I was gonna... wake him up. Talk to him a little. I’ve been trying to, uh, figure a way around his, his brainwashing. Hydra, they—they put all these words in his head, and anyone can use them to control him, make him do... anything. And he just got scared that he’d be dangerous to us if we kept him around, so he asked us to... Well.” Steve gestures awkwardly at the cryochamber, Bucky sleeping inside it.

Wanda looks him in the eye for a moment, unblinking. Then she points at Steve’s lap, the red book resting there. “And are those the words?” she asks.

“Yeah. Well, not just that, but—they’re in there. Yes.”

Wanda hesitates. “Can I see them?” she asks softly.

Steve hesitates, too. He’s not sure what Bucky would say to this. Actually, he has a pretty good idea—but... but honestly, Steve’s running out of leads. He glances at Bucky’s elongated face in the glass. Maybe a second opinion wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

So Steve opens up the notebook, flips to the page with the now-familiar green lettering in the margins. He hands the book over to Wanda.

She takes it from him, holds it like it’s something fragile, or sacred. Her eyes scan over the words with an almost frightening intensity.

“You broke your arm once when you were younger, didn’t you?” Wanda asks suddenly, voice deceptively light. Steve blinks.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “When I was nine.”

“Nine...” Wanda murmurs. Her fingers trace the words on the page.

Something tugs at Steve’s consciousness. _Nine,_ he thinks, and then his stomach bottoms out.

“Hang on,” he says, not sure who he’s talking to. “Hang on... Wait.” And he scrambles closer to Wanda’s side so he can look over shoulder at the too-familiar green lettering in the margins of the red book, at where the words stare back at him. One word in particular.

 _Nine,_ it says. There, in green ink, for all to see.

Steve’s brain fizzles and pops inside his skull. “Wanda... Wanda, how did you—?”

“I think I can help you,” she says, voice firm, eyes finding Steve and pinning him down. “I want to help. Will you let me?”

Steve suddenly feels like he’s dangerously close to her. He doesn’t like it, doesn’t like that he’s—but he is. He’s scared of her. He forgets, sometimes, that Wanda Maximoff might be the most powerful person he knows.

“What do you mean, help?” Steve probes cautiously. “What are you gonna do?”

Wanda seems to lose some of her bravado then. She fidgets. “It would be—invasive,” she starts. “I would have to... I would have to enter his mind. I can seek out the—the fault lines, the points where the structural integrity is weakest. This is what I did to you and the other Avengers, when we met. But this time, instead of tearing his mind down, I would... build it up. Try and help it heal.”

Steve shakes his head, heart in his throat. “Wanda...”

“Please,” she says, and the word breaks in half on the way out. Steve stares. “Please. I want to... I hate to see you like this. I can feel your—even if I could not feel it, I can see it, and it’s—I am... worried about you.”

She meets his stare head-on, pleading.

“Let me help,” Wanda says, small.

Steve’s approaching the ledge. He feels it.

He knows he shouldn’t. He knows what Bucky would say. What Sam, Nat, and Clint would all say. He knows... but...

Wanda’s looking at him, open and vulnerable. Asking him to trust her.

And the thing is, Steve’s vulnerable too. He’s a goddamn open wound. Has been for a long time. And as much as Wanda needs to be trusted, Steve needs to trust. And he needs...

...So Steve steps off the ledge.

“Okay,” he says, his stomach twisting itself in knots. “Okay.”

Wanda looks unjustifiably relieved. “Okay,” she parrots. A pause, and she meets Steve’s eye again, more cautious this time. “Would you... would you like to come with me? Into his mind?”

Jesus. Steve can hardly _breathe_ for how much he wants that.

He settles back on his stool and takes Wanda’s hand. “Lead the way,” he says, sounding braver than he feels.

Wanda smiles, once, briefly, and then it fades. Her eyes land on Bucky’s prone form, and she visibly gulps.

One breath. Two breaths. Three.

Steve feels Wanda’s hand tighten around his, and then he is lost.

 

*~*~*

 

The heat hits Steve first. God, it’s unbearable—like the worst summer he ever passed back in Brooklyn, the sun beating down on the sidewalk all day, filling it up with searing rays that still bled from the pavement well into the night. He’d spent so many sweltering nights like this with Bucky, the two of them lying miserable and sweaty and only half-asleep on top of their customary pile of cushions, waiting for the sun to rise because at least then they didn’t have to pretend they could sleep so their parents wouldn’t catch them...

Steve almost doesn’t notice the scene forming around him, he’s so wrapped up in his own memory. But then there’re the couch cushions, and there’s that grimy Brooklyn apartment, and there’s the sun just barely starting to rise outside the window—and there’s Bucky, just like he was at ten years old, lying next to a nine-year-old Steve with his arm in a sling.

“...Jeez, Buck, you’re like a furnace,” the younger Steve is saying, curled up next to Bucky atop the cushion pile. He says it like he’d love nothing more than to get as far as possible from Bucky, but then—and, yeah, Steve remembers this, remembers the guilt and the fear, neither strong enough to stop him—he curls in just the tiniest bit closer.

“Ugh, don’t touch me,” Bucky gripes back, and Steve can’t help but smile. “You’re all sweaty.” He doesn’t move away, either.

“Furnace,” says a voice beside Steve. He turns and finds Wanda there, watching the scene right along with him. He tamps down an oblique swell of embarrassment.

But then he focuses on what she said. _Furnace._ He sees the word before him, written in green.

“Don’t touch me,” Bucky’s saying, but something’s wrong—Steve looks back, and the apartment and the cushions and the little nine-year-old Steve are gone, and it’s not a ten-year-old Bucky lying there anymore, it’s a 27-year-old Bucky, his hair mussed, his eyes wild, his old Howling Commandos uniform ripped and bloodied, and—Jesus Christ, where’s his _arm—_

“Don’t touch me,” Bucky’s saying, “Don’t touch me. _Don’t touch me—”_ and his voice is ragged, wretched, and the temperature just keeps rising, rising, rising, and Steve thinks he might pass out.

And then Bucky screams.

The heat swirls around them, pungent, soaking like wine, like blood, into nauseous tidal waves of harsh red light. Steve goes to his knees. His head is full of cotton, buzzing distantly, and the only clear thing in it is Bucky’s scream. Jesus Christ, that scream—it’s just like—

A gust of unimaginably cold air wafts over them, and Steve becomes aware of Bucky again—Bucky, sprinkled with snow, lying at the bottom of a ravine, a train chugging away far above. The wind screams through the rocks, and Bucky lies silent and bleeds.

"Freight car," Wanda whispers.

The scene flickers. The heat intensifies, like an oven opening in Steve’s face. The smell is unbearable, burnt flesh, and rot, and—and there’s Bucky, strapped to a table in a cold, ascetic lab—in a gleaming bank vault—in a dank underground bunker, and Steve feels like he’s burning from the inside out, and Bucky just screams.

A woman materializes from the shadows, approaching Bucky. It’s—it’s Wanda, and she’s swathed in red, and Steve is _burning_ but she looks totally calm, and she bends down close and whispers something in Bucky’s ear.

Steve thinks there’s no way Bucky can hear her over his own ragged cries, but—but the cries cease, and Steve sags with relief.

The restraints dissolve against Bucky’s skin, and immediately he’s rearing up, metal hand whipping out, clutching Wanda by the throat. Steve shouts, strains toward them—but then he has to work to uncross his eyes as Wanda takes on a thousand different faces, like masks, like suits of someone else’s skin. Bucky watches them all as they come and go, his dead eyes coming alive with a sickening, horrified heat. Steve doesn’t recognize all the faces, but he picks out several twentieth-century political figures, Nick Fury, a woman he thinks is Tony’s mother—and there, that’s... that’s _him—_

A cool, blue-green thread snakes from Wanda’s chest, Wanda who is right now wearing Steve’s face, and the thread wraps around Bucky with a visible tenderness, forcing his arms to his sides. Bucky allows himself to be disarmed, mesmerized, mild. The thread pulses with a soft blue-green light, and then the light spreads outward like the tide, and Bucky drifts, weightless, as that light overtakes Steve.

Steve is underwater. He’s in the river, and he’s in the air, and this—this is familiar, this is—something sloshes in his chest, and it might be water clawing its way into his lungs but it might be the look in Bucky’s eyes, the liquid filling them, bringing the blue into stark relief, and he doesn’t know when he ended up broken and bloody beneath Bucky on the helicarrier, but he knows this feeling, he _remembers—_

Steve blinks, and then he’s watching from afar as Bucky pulls his limp body ashore, metal hand coiled in Steve’s old World War II uniform.

“Benign,” Wanda whispers, beside Steve again. Two sepia-toned voices skate over the scene, air bubbles breaching the surface of the water -- confession: _I thought you were dead;_  retort: _I thought you were smaller_ \-- and Wanda adds, “Daybreak.” Steve can’t tear his eyes away from Bucky long enough to look at her.

 _'Cause I'm with you till the end of the line,_ the riverbed burbles. Something flickers across Bucky’s face as he stares down at the other Steve, the Steve who’s half-drowned and coughing up water, and the Steve who’s a ways off and fine but whose lungs ache in sympathy can’t identify the look on Bucky’s face before it’s gone, and he’s turning away.

“Wait,” Steve croaks, throat rough, water heaving in his lungs, but Bucky can’t hear him.

Bucky walks, hunched pathetically around his flesh arm. The backdrop flickers—green, brown, grey, blue; water, sky, countryside. Bucky stops on a city block, ducks into an alley and collapses against a cold brick wall. Day fades into night, and then into the cold light of dawn. Bucky drags himself to his feet.

And then they’re in an autoshop, a tiny, grimy place on a quiet street. Bucky’s working on a car, his hair hanging lank, long, his hands blackened with oil. The tang of metal and gasoline fills Steve’s nostrils.

“Rusted,” Wanda murmurs, and the ghost of a younger, shinier Bucky follows the older, tarnished Bucky around the room, copying his movements, only he’s working on much older-looking automobiles. The younger Bucky solidifies, and the older one disappears, and Steve remembers this—this was back in Brooklyn, and he and Bucky were teenagers, and Bucky worked in the autoshop down the road to make a little extra money for his family, and for Steve and his ma, too, and Steve never quite understood—

“—why you gotta work so hard, Bucky,” a teenage Steve is telling Bucky, lips curled in a pout. “Come on, come out with me. Just for tonight. I’ll even let you take me dancing!”

Bucky moves around Steve, smiling and shaking his head, but not looking at him. “I’m sorry, buddy, I’m on the clock. I told Felix I’d get the Ford fixed up today.”

“But it’s your _birthday,_ Buck,” Steve protests. “You shouldn’t have to work like this on your birthday.”

“Seventeen,” Wanda doesn’t have to say. Steve remembers.

"C'mon, Buck," the younger Steve is saying. "If you won't do it for you, do it for me."

The young Bucky turns to look at the young Steve, and when their eyes meet it’s like Bucky can’t help but smile.

“Tell you what,” he says to Steve, gentle, “I’m almost done here. You can wait for me while I finish up, and then we’ll go back to my place, swipe some o’ my dad’s liquor, take it to the roof, and drink to my old age. How’s that sound?”

The younger Steve’s smile is absolutely blinding. The scene flees in the face of it, like shadows dissolving in the dawn, and the older Steve finds himself standing beside Wanda in a dim, gritty apartment. He recognizes this—this is where he found Bucky. The apartment in Romania.

There’s a rustle in the corner. Steve looks—it’s Bucky, lying on that pathetic little mattress of his, shivering. Steve’s heart lurches at the sight.

Bucky tosses and turns. It’s cold in here—god, it’s _freezing,_ and Steve looks out through the newspaper taped over the windows and thinks he can make out the swirling static shadows of snowfall.

A frustrated sigh, and Bucky stops moving. Just lies on his back and stares at the ceiling, face blank. He stays like that for a minute or two, the wind whistling outside, and then, slowly, he rises, abandoning the bed with its inadequate insulation and settling at a desk in the corner. He picks up a black pen, opens up a notebook—and Steve doesn’t remember this one from the stash in his room, but he recognizes it as the one he picked up when he visited this place himself, the one they had to leave behind as they fled from the authorities.

Bucky writes, and a voice fills the space, rough and distant, but unmistakably Bucky’s.

 

_Picked up a few science journals at the library today. I like catching up on all the stuff that’s happened since the war, and science has come a long way since the World Fair of ’43. Coming back the way I did... well, it wasn’t the greatest, for a lot of reasons. But seeing how much more the human race knows, how much more we can do now, after only a few decades... that’s a definite plus._

_One of the journals I found had a lot to say about glaciers. They’re melting, y’know. They say the sea level will rise so much in the next fifty years that life on Earth won’t be possible anymore. At least, not human life. Scientists are trying to stop global temperatures from rising anymore so the glaciers will stay frozen._

_Glaciers are responsible for a lot of the landscape these days—during an ice age, they’ll crawl across the earth, huge and slow and powerful, and carve new shapes into the land. I read that normally, when a glacier slides down a mountain, it takes little pieces with it, makes the mountain smaller over time—but sometimes, instead of making the mountain smaller, it’ll make it bigger. Sometimes, a glacier can help make a mountain grow. Protect it._

_They call it “glacial armoring,” and the difference between protecting and destroying, I read, is in the climate. A glacier can only protect a mountain in the cold._

 

Bucky’s pen lifts from the paper, just for a moment. He shivers.

 

_It is so goddamn cold here. But I know—I have to remember—it’s necessary. I have to be cold, for him. I’ll stay frozen if it means helping him grow._

 

Bucky sets the pen aside, stares down at the page, his face in shadow. Behind him, a figure appears—it’s Steve, scrawny and sparkling, sixteen years old.

“Do it for me, Buck,” he says, smiling. Bucky’s shoulders cave in.

“One,” Wanda murmurs.

The wind shifts, a blizzard screaming outside the window. Steve feels a stiffening beside him, and turns—Wanda, who’s been so calm and collected through all this, looks suddenly like she’s been shot in the chest.

Steve reaches out, grasps her arm. “Wanda?” he tries, but she doesn’t seem to hear. She shudders beneath Steve’s grip.

“Wanda,” Steve repeats, urgent. He shakes her, but she doesn’t respond. _“Wanda.”_

“Do it for me,” a voice says, and it’s a different voice now. Dark. Jagged. Steve turns.

His sixteen-year-old self has disappeared. A man has taken his place, a man with blond hair and blue eyes and a wretched gash of a smile on his face. Steve recognizes him—it’s Alexander Pierce. Bucky’s frozen before him, a rabbit caught in headlights.

“You were meant for so much more than this,” Pierce is saying, staring Bucky down, voice like venom. “You will do extraordinary things for us.”

And then, to Steve’s utter shock, Pierce turns, trains that unblinking eye on Wanda.

“You were meant for so much more,” he says to her, and it’s not Pierce anymore. It’s...

_What the hell?_

Steve’s fingers tighten around Wanda’s arm, and he knows he must be hurting her, but she’s not responding _at all,_ and his mind won’t stop turning, and he can’t stop shaking her, repeating her name over and over again—

“Wanda. Wanda, come on, that’s enough. Let’s go. It’s time to go now. _Wanda.”_

Baron Strucker’s eyes bore into Wanda, and he grins. Steve is thrown from Wanda as if from an explosion.

Steve rolls on the floor, groans. He feels like he just fell ten stories. When he finally manages to lift his head from the ground, he can just make out the blurry shapes of Wanda and Strucker—he's closer to her now, close enough to touch—

And then Strucker’s grin splits his whole face open, and his skin sloughs away to reveal someone else in his place, someone sickeningly familiar.

“Tell us,” Thaddeus Ross is saying, reaching out toward Wanda. “Just tell us.”

And his fingers brush a shuddering Wanda’s arm, and electricity arcs from his fingers to her skin, and Wanda throws her head back and _screams._

“Wanda! _Wanda!”_ Steve’s throat burns, he’s yelling so loud, but Wanda can’t hear him. She just keeps screaming, and Steve feels himself getting dragged away.

Ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet away, and Steve begins to lose sight of the two figures locked together amidst a shower of sparks. He can barely make it out when a third figure steps into view, aims a solid blow at Ross’ solar plexus; the blow finds its mark with the gut-wrenching crunch of metal on bone, and Ross flies away, scattering like a dandelion on the wind.

The last thing Steve sees is the remaining two figures crumpling together to the floor.

 

*~*~*

 

Steve wakes screaming.

He flies back, arms flailing, he and the stool both toppling to the floor with a clatter. He lies on the ground, vision dancing with little lights, unable to catch his breath; after a few moments, he realizes he’s not alone there. Wanda lies next to him, shivering, her face shining with sweat.

“Oh, god,” Steve chokes. “Wanda... Jesus, _Wanda—”_

He’s shaking her and shaking her but she’s not moving, not answering, and Steve’s hand trembles as he holds it in front of her mouth to feel for breath. It’s there, just barely.

“Steve...”

Steve starts, turns. Bucky’s there, sitting up, looking at him. Staring. The glass of the cryochamber lies shattered around him.

Bucky looks at Steve like he doesn’t know him, and Steve’s stomach clenches.

“Steve..." Bucky asks, eyes wide, "What did you do?”


	4. Would you really rush out for me now?

The doctors take Wanda away on a stretcher. The image is... familiar.

This time, as she passes him, prone, pale, and Steve reaches out to her, he aborts the motion halfway through. Back in the Raft prison, he knew that she’d been hurt because of him, that her injuries were in some way his fault—but somewhere down the line, it had still been someone else’s choice to harm her, and so Steve found it a relatively simple task to compartmentalize his guilt. This time, the fault is entirely his: yes, maybe she offered to help, but Steve should have known better. She’d just come out of a coma, for Christ’s sake. Her nervous system was shot. And while Steve still isn’t quite sure what happened to her in Bucky’s mind, he does know that she wasn’t ready for it. She’s lucky to be alive right now.

So when Wanda passes him on the stretcher, and he reaches out on instinct, Steve stops himself. He doesn’t deserve to touch her.

It takes Steve by surprise when his hand, still suspended awkwardly between himself and his injured friend, is captured in a smaller one. Her grip is weak, but Wanda’s eyes are firm and far too forgiving when Steve meets them.

She waits for Steve to return her gaze, and then she squeezes his hand.

Steve isn’t sure what he expects, but it isn’t the significant look Wanda shoots over his shoulder. Steve follows her gaze to where Bucky sits by the window, far away from the cryochamber and its surrounding constellations of glass. One of the doctors is checking him over, but Bucky ignores the doctor entirely, stares past him, right at Steve.

“Tell him,” Wanda says, her voice a faint hiss, and Steve turns back to her. “You have to tell him. He doesn’t know.”

Steve stares. “Tell him what?” he starts to say—but before he’s even opened his mouth, Wanda’s hand slips from his own, and the doctors start pulling her away.

A harsh clatter of footsteps swells closer in the hallway outside. It stops just as Wanda passes through the door, and Steve sees his friends there, watching her go—Nat, Clint, Sam, T’Challa. Horror looks different on each of their faces, but it is recognizable in all.

Sam tears his eyes from Wanda and looks right at Steve, gaze sharp, face pinched. Steve sinks down onto the bench behind him. Buries his face in his hands.

He hears the four of them enter the room, their footfalls approaching him slowly. They stop a few feet away.

“Steve.”

Steve’s never heard Sam’s voice so cold before. He forces himself to look up.

Sam visibly reins in his fury before he speaks. His voice is quiet and utterly terrifying when he asks, “What happened?”

Like a sandcastle in a hurricane, Steve feels his composure crumbling. “I...” His throat closes up. He lowers his gaze, stares hard at his feet. Wills his eyes to stop stinging.

“Steve.” Nat’s voice is softer, more of a question than an accusation. She folds herself gracefully onto the bench beside him. He feels the gossamer touch of her hand on his back.

Somehow, Nat’s generosity is worse than Sam’s rage.

“Jesus,” Steve chokes. His hands are trembling. _“Jesus,_ I... I didn’t think, I never meant for her to... I don’t know what happened.”

“Captain, what were the two of you doing in here?” And that’s T’Challa, his voice unshakably even. Steve latches onto the stability there, uses it to drag himself up.

“We were... I, I came up here to—to talk to Bucky.”

“C’mon, Steve. We talked about this,” Sam chides.

“I _know.”_ And Steve really doesn’t mean for it to come out quite so sharp. He takes a breath, tries again. “I know, Sam. I just... I couldn’t let it go. I had to do something. I can’t...”

There’s the ledge again. It’s disintegrating beneath Steve’s weight. He claws his way back.

 _Stick to facts,_ Steve tells himself, and continues. “I brought the red book with me. The trigger words. I thought I’d ask him about them, just, just one more time. But... I found Wanda here.” God, Steve can still see her there—still pallid, still healing, but her eyes were so bright. “She said she was curious, said... she knew how important Bucky is to me, and she just...” Steve presses the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard, he can feel his pulse there. “I let her look at the book. God, I shouldn’t have let her look at the stupid book. But then she knew, somehow—she asked me about when I was a kid, the time I broke my arm. She asked me how old I was when it happened, and I told her, and—and she made the connection. Jesus, I don’t know how she knew. And then she said—she said she could help. That she knew how I felt, and she hated... hated seeing me like this, and she wanted to help. She just wanted to help.”

“Christ, Steve,” says Clint. “Wanda _just_... I’m not sure you understand all of what they did to her in that prison, but it was... it was bad. She needs time to heal. You can’t just... That girl would do _anything_ for you. You know? And you can’t let her.”

“I know.” Steve breathes, quick and broken. “I know.”

Nat’s rubbing soothing circles into Steve’s back now, and he knows she can feel him shivering. “Then why did you?” she asks gently.

The sob erupts from Steve’s throat without his permission.

“God. I... I just...” His vision blurs, and Steve can’t find the words. There are too many. There aren’t enough.

“Well? You got anything to add here?” Sam demands. Steve looks up to find him glaring daggers at Bucky from across the room. Bucky, who’s staring at Steve, and looks like he’s one well-aimed tap away from shattering.

The doctor who’s been treating Bucky steps calmly away and exits the room.

“Come on, Sam, it’s not his fault,” Clint reasons.

“No, see, I think it is.” And Sam’s stepping away from Steve now, advancing on Bucky, broken glass grinding into dust beneath his feet. “I think none of this would’ve happened if this jackass weren’t so determined to keep running away.”

“Sam, don’t,” Nat warns.

“You’re seeing this, right?” Sam stops just a few feet shy of Bucky, waving in Steve’s direction as he speaks. “You see how hard he’s working, don’t you? How much he’s hurting? Well here’s what you didn’t get to see—he’s been running himself ragged for _two years_ trying to track your ass down. He very nearly destroyed every other friendship he has trying to keep you safe. He’s barely eaten or slept or spoken to another living soul since you went back under, because he spends _every moment_ looking for a way to keep you around.”

Bucky’s curling further and further into himself the more Sam talks. He seems unable to break eye contact.

“He let a girl who just woke up from a _coma_ risk her life to bring you back into the world,” hisses Sam, “because _that’s_ how much he needs you. He needs you so much he can’t think straight. He needs you so much he’s _tearing himself apart.”_

Sam leans in dangerously close. Steve doesn’t think Bucky’s breathing.

“So,” Sam says, voice low, lethal, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

Bucky’s eyes are shining. He looks down, fixes his gaze on a jagged piece of glass next to Sam’s shoe.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky murmurs.

Sam stares down at Bucky, hard. Then he scoffs, backs away.

“You’re sorry,” he spits. “Y’know what? I’m sick of sorry. I’m _so fucking tired_ of everybody saying sorry. How about we all just stop doin’ things we have to feel sorry about, huh?”

Sam sneers, shakes his head. He backs away from Bucky and looks to the others in the room.

“I think it’s time we fucking fixed this,” he says. “We need to get rid of that damn conditioning. Right?” Sam looks back at Bucky. “You won’t come back till the words are gone, right? So let’s find a way to get ‘em gone.”

“I don’t,” Bucky croaks, then stops. Swallows. “I don’t know if you can,” he says.

“We,” says Sam, and Bucky looks up, confused. “You mean _we,_ right? You’re in this with us, aren’t you? Or don’t you want to get better?”

Bucky sets his jaw. Says nothing.

“Jesus.” Sam scrubs a hand over his face. “Y’know, with all the things he’s said about you, everything I’ve heard... I don’t know, I thought you’d be better than this. I thought you were both better than this.”

Sam doesn’t look at him, but Steve knows he’s talking about him too, now. He winces.

Sam’s looking Bucky in the eye again, but he doesn’t look angry anymore. Just resigned.

“I’m on his side,” says Sam, gesturing at Steve. “And y’know what? I’m on your side, too, if you let me be.” He breathes once, in, out. Even. “Where are you?”

Bucky’s face flickers. He makes no reply.

“Captain,” T’Challa cuts in, and Steve meets his eye reluctantly. “You say you have been investigating the words yourself? Interrogating Barnes about them?”

Steve nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I thought it might—it might help. I don’t know.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” offers Nat. “Conditioning like this usually revolves around a particularly strong emotion, a point of trauma that can be leveraged for control. Unpacking that trauma could very well be the key to unraveling the conditioning.”

“So? Did you find it?” That’s Clint, and he looks back and forth between Steve and Bucky as he says it.

Steve looks to Bucky, expectant, but Bucky’s mouth stays clamped shut.

Steve sighs. “No, I... I don’t think we did. The talking didn’t seem to be doing much... Wanda got closer, I thought, but—well, I’m not exactly sure what happened.”

Bucky clears his throat, and everyone turns to look at him.

“She, uh.” He pauses, searching the air in front of him for the words. “What she found, it... resonated.”

Nat’s hand on Steve’s back stills. “What do you mean?”

“I mean... Was she—was she like me?”

“Like you? How?”

Bucky waves his hand in front of him. “Like...” But he can’t finish.

Steve thinks he knows. “She was experimented on,” he says, and Bucky’s head snaps up. “There was a man... Strucker. He worked for Hydra. After Wanda’s parents were killed, Strucker convinced her and her brother to volunteer for—for a procedure. I’m not really sure—but that’s where she got her powers. Is that what you mean?”

Bucky nods. “Yeah. Well—well, no. Not... You said she volunteered?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Bucky just looks at him, and then, slowly, shakes his head. “I don’t... I don’t think she did.”

It dawns on all of them slowly. The room fills with static electricity, the portent of lightning on a mountaintop.

Clint finds his voice first. “You think she was... taken? Tortured? Like you?”

Bucky nods. “And then they made her forget.”

“Jesus fuck,” hisses Sam. Nat’s hand spasms on Steve’s back, and Clint goes white as a sheet. Bucky hangs his head.

Steve can’t seem to close his mouth. He knew it wasn’t... pleasant, or easy, what Wanda went through, and he knew Ross did a number on her in the Raft prison, but he didn’t—suddenly what he saw in Bucky’s head makes that much more sense, the flickering between Pierce and Strucker and Ross, the things they said— _just tell us, do it for me, you will do extraordinary things for us_... Jesus Christ, if he’d known... if he’d known, he would never, _never_ have let her go in. Jesus. He should have known.

Something else comes back to him then, too, and Steve straightens.

“You helped her, didn’t you?” he realizes.

Bucky looks up, meets Steve’s eye.

“You helped her,” Steve repeats. “In there, when... You helped her. Fought him off.”

Bucky inhales, holds it a moment. Exhales slowly. His shoulders rise and fall in a sloppy shrug.

“Somethin’ I got pretty good at, these last two years,” he mutters. “Fightin’ off the monsters.”

Steve just looks at Bucky, his chest filling up. He doesn’t know how to say thank you. But the corner of Bucky’s lip quirks up, the tiniest smile, and Steve thinks he knows.

Clint shakes himself. “Okay, so I guess Wanda couldn’t find the... the linchpin. Right? So what do we do? If we can’t talk our way to it, and Wanda’s telepathy couldn’t get to it, what other options do we have?”

“It’s not that Wanda _couldn’t_ reach it,” says Natasha, “it’s just that her own trauma got in the way. So maybe, if we can find another way into Bucky’s memories—and if Bucky’s willing, of course,” and here she makes solid eye contact with Bucky, who hesitates only a moment before nodding his assent, “if we can find another way in, there’s a chance we can find the linchpin and yank it out.”

“Anyone got Spock’s number?” Clint mutters, just as T’Challa says, “I may know of a solution.”

They all turn and look at T’Challa.

“There is a technology,” he begins slowly, “a new invention, created for scenarios just like this one. It is a type of virtual reality which allows the user to engage with, digest, and move past traumatic memories.”

T’Challa turns to Bucky then, looks him square in the eye.

“Your mind is not your own,” he tells a rapt Bucky. “It is consumed by grief, violence, and fear. This would be a way for you to take it back.”

“Well, I’m sold,” says Sam. “Where can we get it?”

“It... will not be easy,” T’Challa hedges, and he looks at Bucky almost apologetically.

“Why? What’s so hard about it?”

It’s Natasha who answers.

“The process is called Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing,” she says. “It was invented by Tony Stark.”

“...Oh, hell no,” Clint groans. “Tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

“You want me to lie?”

Clint hides his face, muffling a curse behind his hand. “He’s not gonna want to help us,” he mumbles.

“Yeah, thanks, Captain Obvious,” Sam snaps. “So, what do we do? Steal it?”

_“No.”_

This last voice belongs to Bucky. It’s harsh, determined; Steve looks, and he’s staring at Sam with the same expression he always used to get when Steve started talking about enlisting—the one that let Steve know he wasn’t gonna budge.

“No,” Bucky repeats. “I’ll... I’ll cooperate, whatever you want to do. I’ll help you get the words outta my head. But I’m not taking anything else from that man that he doesn’t want to give.”

“Bucky,” Steve pleads, but the hard light doesn’t leave Bucky’s eyes. Those eyes find T’Challa again, and Steve watches as the king nods his approval.

“We don’t have to steal it,” says Nat, her gaze distant. Her mind working. “It’s a long shot, but... I think we can convince him.”

Clint pinches the bridge of his nose. “Jesus. I hope you got some stealth suits for us, Your Highness.”

“Of course. Come with me.”

T’Challa heads for the door, Clint on his heels. Natasha’s hand leaves Steve’s back, only to come to rest on his knee, squeezing it to draw Steve’s attention.

“She’s gonna be fine,” Nat whispers. “Everyone’s gonna be fine.”

Steve stares into her bright, clear eyes. He hopes she’s right.

She shoots him the ghost of a comforting smile, and then Natasha gets up to join Clint and T’Challa on their way to the door. Before crossing the threshold, T’Challa stops, turns one more time to look at Bucky.

“Ms. Maximoff caused significant damage to the cryochamber,” he says, and Steve glances again at the empty cryobed, the mess of broken glass speckling the floor. “It will be out of commission for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, there is a sitting room down the hall, the kitchens are on the ground floor, and you are welcome to one of the bedrooms on the residential level if you find yourself in need of sleep.”

Bucky just looks at him, inscrutable. “Thanks,” he says, “but I think I’ve slept enough.”

T’Challa nods, and Steve thinks he detects a hint of a smile. “Very well,” the king says, and slips from the room.

Clint snaps off a two-fingered salute. “See you on the other side,” he tells Steve, and then he and Natasha follow T’Challa out the door.

Sam still stands in front of Bucky. A moment’s silence, and then he sighs, crouching in front of Bucky to meet his downturned gaze. Glass crunches beneath his feet.

“For what it’s worth,” Sam says, gentle, “I think you deserve to get better. And I’m looking forward to getting to know the infamous Bucky Barnes.”

There’s a brief moment where Bucky’s face cracks open, and he looks disbelieving, hopeful. Then his lips twitch.

“Really?” he says. “I think I’ve had just about all I can take of Sam Wilson.”

“Ouch,” Sam chuckles. He claps Bucky on the arm and gets to his feet.

On his way to the door, Sam stops in front of Steve. Steve almost can’t bring himself to meet his friend’s eye, but he’s never been a coward, so he clenches his jaw, raises his head.

The look on Sam’s face is infinitely tender as he reaches out, lays a hand on Steve’s shoulder.

“Don’t do anything stupid till I get back,” he says, half-fond, half-reproving.

Steve’s about to respond— _How can I? You’re takin’ all the stupid with you_ —but the words haven’t even come out yet and already they swell in his throat, familiar. He looks sharply at Bucky, who also seems thrown. Speechless, Steve just nods.

Sam appears satisfied; he pats Steve’s shoulder once, and then he reclaims his hand and follows the others out of the room.

The silence is... uncomfortable. Full. Steve doesn’t move, and neither does Bucky. They both just sit there, across the room from each other, neither looking the other in the eye.

It’s Steve who caves first. He seeks Bucky out across a sea of glass shards sparkling in the midday sun. He doesn’t even mean to do it.

A thousand shattered rainbow fireflies bounce off the glass and dance across Bucky’s skin, catch in his hair. He’s staring down at his toes.

There are so many things Steve should say. Things he should explain, things he should apologize for. The sheer volume of them overwhelms him, and so he steps past them all, crunching his way across the field of glass until he’s reached Bucky’s side.

Bucky looks up at his approach. His eyes are wide, questioning.

“Let’s get you out of here,” murmurs Steve, holding out his hand.

Bucky’s mouth falls open. And then it snaps shut. His hand rises up, tentative, fingers sliding cool and tremulous against Steve’s.

Steve can’t help his sigh of relief as he leads Bucky out of the room.

 

*~*~*

 

Tony doesn’t know why he goes in. Actually, he does—he’s always been way too damn curious for his own good. If he were a cat, he’d have died all nine times by now.

Plus, what the fuck else is he supposed to do? Steve asked him for the room months ago, refused to explain why— _Tony, do me a favor and just... don’t ask. Okay? I’ll explain it someday, I promise, but for now, just... please_ —and everybody knows that withholding information from Tony is as good as begging him to snoop. He was always the best at sniffing out Christmas presents as a kid. His parents couldn’t keep a single one from his clutches.

It’s this last thought that brings the scowl back to Tony’s face full-force. Once upon a time, he’d actually respected Steve’s privacy. But Steve forfeited that right the moment he chose a murderer over his own family.

So, without further gilding the lily, and with no more ado, Tony shorts out the locking mechanism on Steve Rogers’ secret extra room at the Avengers compound in upstate New York, thrusts open the door, and steps inside.

It’s... a bedroom. A pretty boring one, at that—there’s not even a TV. Though Tony does have to admit that it looks comfortable. The walls are a cool hunter green hue, the linens a deep, sultry scarlet; the bed frame is walnut, intricately carved, and there’s a solid-looking desk of the same wood tucked beneath the window, plus a matching bookshelf in the corner, tall, filled to the brim with old, well-loved volumes. Two nightstands and a thick, sturdy dresser complete the set.

The longer Tony looks, the more he thinks he knows who this room was intended for, but by now he can’t help himself; he drifts further into the room, running his fingers along the spines of first-edition Fitzgeralds, Steinbecks, Hemingways, and one particularly worn-looking collection of Langston Hughes poems. On closer inspection, there are some newer volumes on the bookshelf, too—science fiction, mostly: Theodore Sturgeon, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Douglas Adams. Tony almost misses a third-edition _Frankenstein_ buried among these.

He moves on to the dresser. The drawers are empty, but there’s an antique gramophone sitting on top of it, next to a small stack of vinyls. Tony picks through the stack, noting that they all date back to the ‘30s or ‘40s—Eartha Kitt, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Sinatra. He pulls out the sleeve for a Harry James album only to discover that the record is missing; when he looks, it’s already sitting in the player.

 _What the hell,_ Tony thinks, just a tiny bit reckless, and lifts the needle.

Music fills the little room. Tony turns around, surveys his surroundings, lets the soft, slow strains of a muted trumpet waft over him. The music bleeds through the air, soaks into the walls, and as Tony listens, his eyes alight on the desk.

There’s a notebook sitting there, black leather cover, a few pens and pencils in a cup by the upper left-hand corner. Grainy strings swell from the gramophone’s bell as Tony approaches, lifts the front cover of the notebook.

There’s an inscription on the first page—a little doodle of two teenage boys, framed from behind. They’re both scrawny, but one’s especially so, and they’re leaning on each other, arms wrapped casually around each other’s backs, staring at something in the distance. Beneath the picture, in a familiar hand, it says, _Welcome home._

Tony snatches his hand away like it’s been burned, stumbles back a few steps. He sinks down onto the bed, suddenly unable to get enough air.

He closes his eyes against the weight of it all, tries to force his heartrate down. When he’s got his breathing under control again, Tony finds himself looking around this room, so clearly assembled with love, and trying to imagine the man who would have occupied it. The man Steve was expecting there.

He can’t help it—Tony laughs, bitter, bitten-off. It’s just—it’s ironic, is all. It’s fucking hilarious, because the man he’s picturing... well, Tony thinks he might just’ve liked to meet that man. He thinks maybe that man would’ve made a good addition to the family.

It’s well past midnight by the time Tony leaves that room. He went through six albums and read the first chapters of seventeen different books before he could wrench himself away. Now, he slumps back through the silent, empty halls of the compound, heading for his office, not even pretending he’ll be able to sleep.

Funny thing, though—when he enters his office, it’s silent, but not empty.

“Don’t you try to take advantage of me, now,” Tony quips tiredly. “I have pepper spray.”

It’s swathed in late-night shadows, but Natasha Romanoff’s mop of vibrant red hair is unmistakable. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” she says.

“Barton,” says Tony, nodding to the figure on her left. “Wilson,” to her right. “Come to kiss my toes and beg my forgiveness, have you?”

“Not quite,” Sam replies.

“Well, in that case, you know where the door is,” Tony says mildly. “Or the window. Or, hey, the trash chute, that one seems fitting.”

At this point, Tony turns away, only to notice a fourth shadow lurking in the corner behind him.

“Huh,” he says. “Did someone leave the back door open? Seems a stray cat has wandered inside.”

“That is no way to address a king,” T’Challa chides, “or a friend.”

“Friend?” Tony looks significantly from T’Challa to the Three Stooges and back again. “...Right. So the rumors are true—you _have_ switched sides.”

T’Challa looks up sharply. “Rumors?”

Tony waves him off. “Down, kitty. Don’t worry—the only people gossiping are the ones in my head. Kathy thinks you’ve gotten fat, by the way. But little Timothy’s nursing a bit of a crush. Watch out at the office Christmas party, he gets handsy when he’s drunk.”

“Tony,” Natasha interrupts. “This isn’t a social call.”

“I figured.” Tony slouches behind the desk, collapsing none-too-gracefully into his expensive ergonomic rolly chair. “See, I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out why you _are_ here, because if you’re not here to apologize, I thought I made my feelings pretty clear already. You did see Rogers’ face, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Sam rumbles, dangerous. “Not cool.”

“Yeah, well, you should’ve seen the other guy. I don’t have supersoldier healing, by the way. Had to get better all by myself.”

“You seem okay now,” Clint tries.

“Do I? Huh. Must be the Pilates.”

“Physically, you seem okay,” Nat specifies, and Tony braces himself. “Other than that, though... how are you? How’s everyone?”

“What, you’re gonna pretend like you care now?” Tony spits. “I thought this wasn’t a social call.”

Sam sighs. “It’s not. Tony... we’re here to ask a favor.”

Tony barks a laugh. “A _favor?_ Are you shitting me?”

“It’s for Steve,” Clint cuts in. “He’s... he’s not doing too well.”

“Cry me a fucking river.”

“Deflect all you want, Tony, but you can’t tell me you don’t still care about him,” says Nat.

“Yes, I can, Ms. Double-Negative. I’ll do it right now: I don’t care about him. He chose a murderer over me, and that means he lost the privilege of my giving a damn.”

Clint takes a couple steps toward him. “You didn’t give him much choice, Tony. The way he tells it, you were ready to kill Bucky right in front of him. What’d you expect him to do, sit there and watch?”

Tony slams his hand down on the desk. “I expected him to _give a shit,”_ he hisses. “I expected him to _care_ a little bit, _maybe,_ about the supposed friendship we had. I expected him not to keep dirty little secrets from me, dirty little _goddamn important_ secrets, because he didn’t trust me not to lose my shit over it.”

“But that’s exactly what you did,” Sam points out. “You lost your shit.”

“Oh, yeah? And what the _fuck_ would you have done? The man _killed my mother.”_ Tony hates the way his voice cracks around the words. “My sweet, way-too-forgiving mother. Rogers told you that, didn’t he? You know that his doe-eyed little buttbuddy there snuffed my parents, right? The way I see it, he deserves to die. They both do.”

A shocked silence sucks all the air from the room. Tony’s caught between satisfaction and crushing guilt. So, the usual.

T’Challa slinks out of the shadows, approaches the desk. “You don’t really believe that,” he murmurs. He sounds infuriatingly certain about it, too. Tony wants to refute him, but can’t quite bring himself to. He settles for a vicious glare.

“What do you want from me, anyway?” he asks instead.

“We need one of your inventions,” says Clint. “The... Nat, what’s it called again?”

“Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing,” she supplies.

“My BARF glasses? What do you—”

And then he gets it.

“Oh, _fuck_ no. No. I am _not_ helping him. No fucking way.”

“He’s a good guy, Tony,” presses Clint. “For all the shit that’s happened, everything he’s done... he’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, sure. By the way, have I shown you the flying pig coop out back?”

“C’mon, man,” says Sam.

Tony scowls. “I thought you said this was about Steve.”

“It is.” Natasha circles around the desk till she’s standing right next to Tony, staring him down. “It’s about both of them, actually. See, maybe you don’t like Bucky. Maybe you don’t care about him at all, and that’s fine. But I _know_ you care about Steve. Which means you’ll care when I tell you that he is falling to pieces right now, because Bucky’s too scared of his Winter Soldier conditioning to come out of cryofreeze, and Steve’s too stubborn to tell Bucky just how much he needs him to stick around. It’s unstoppable force versus immovable object over here, and there have already been casualties.”

She hesitates, and Tony can’t help it—he looks up, just barely. Trains his eyes on Natasha’s hand, curling into a fist at her side.

“Wanda, she... she got hurt,” Natasha grits out. “Bad. She was trying to help get rid of Bucky’s conditioning. She’d just woken up out of a coma, Tony. And Steve knew she was in bad shape, he _knew_ she needed more time to heal, but he let her try to help anyway, and d’you know why? Because he is _impossibly stupid_ when it comes to Bucky. He’s desperate and irrational and not like Steve at all.”

She sighs, leans against the desk. “What I’m saying, Tony, is that you can’t take it personally. It’s bigger than you, bigger than Wanda, bigger than any of us. Honestly, I think it’s bigger than Bucky, too—I think Steve’s just, just _drowning,_ and he has been for years. Think about it. When he went into the ice, he lost _everything._ He woke up and he was totally alone. And I don’t think he ever quite managed to open up to all of us the way he’d opened up to Bucky and to Peggy Carter and to all the people he knew before. Y’know? I think he was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for this life to leave him the same way the last one did, and we just didn’t notice that he was drifting further and further away from us until it was too late, and... well, you know how well that turned out. And somehow, Bucky’s at the center of it all. I think Steve has put Bucky on a pedestal in his mind, made him into this grand symbol of the kind of belonging he felt before his life fell apart. And he wants to save Bucky so bad now because he feels broken, and he thinks saving Bucky will make him a whole person again.”

Natasha crouches down then, so Tony’s forced to look her right in the eye. He blinks away the shine in his eyes before she notices it.

“I think Steve needs Bucky,” Natasha tells him, urgent, “but even more than that, Tony, I think he needs _us._ His friends. I think he needs to be reminded that even though he’s not living in 1945 anymore, he still has a home.”

And of fucking _course,_ at that exact moment, Tony sees a picture in his mind’s eye, a sketch of two teenage boys leaning on each other. _Welcome home._

Tony can feel his determination crumbling. _Goddammit,_ he thinks. _The puppy-dog look strikes again. And he’s not even here to give it to me._

Tony sighs, scrubs a hand over his face. “Look... Even if I wanted to help, I can’t do a damn thing here. Ross is watching me like a hawk. One false move and I’m toast. And I do _not_ taste good with butter, okay? Trust me.”

“Would you help us if we could find a way around Secretary Ross?” T’Challa chimes in.

“Let’s say sure, since you clearly won’t.”

“Very well. My friends, let us adjourn; Mr. Stark, we’ll contact you when we’ve formulated a plan.”

“Swell. It was nice knowin’ ya.”

Natasha gives him one last long look before she rises and circles back around to the front of the desk. By the time Tony looks up, she, Clint, and T’Challa have disappeared, almost like they were never there.

The only remaining evidence of their visit is Sam, who stands in the doorway, watching him.

“Listen...” Sam starts, “I know there’s a lot of shit between you.” And Tony doesn’t ask who exactly he’s referring to—it doesn’t matter, anyway, because there’s shit everywhere; it hit the fan, and now it’s everywhere. “Just, try to remember—Steve was your family once. Maybe not by blood, but certainly by bond. And family doesn’t quit just because the going got a little tougher. It stays, and it fights.”

Jesus... For once in his goddamn life, Tony finds himself speechless. He grinds his teeth, turns his head, screws his eyes shut.

When he looks back, Sam is gone.

Tony groans, rubbing his eyes and letting his head fall to the desk with a resounding _thunk._ He lays there for a good couple minutes, reeling, miserable, before he decides to go try and get some sleep after all.

He wakes after only a few hours to a phone call.

“Nnyeah? What?” He slurs into the phone, rubbing his eyes. “What is it?”

“Pack your bags,” comes Ross’ voice. “King T’Challa of Wakanda just gave me a call. He’s expressed his sincere remorse for his conduct following the incident in Vienna—he says he knows he violated the dictates of the Sokovia Accords, and he’d like to conduct a special diplomatic session with us in Birnin Zana to renegotiate the terms of his cooperation. Our plane leaves in an hour.”

Tony bites back a laugh. “Sir, yes, sir.”

After Ross hangs up on him, Tony tosses his phone on the mattress and falls back on the bed, hitting the pillow with a _whoomp._ It makes no sense, given the situation he’s found himself in, but for the life of him, he can’t tamp down his smile.

“You sly dog,” Tony mutters, and then, “Oh, sorry. Wrong animal.”

 

*~*~*

 

“Okay,” Steve breathes, setting down his phone. “They’ll be here any minute.” God, but he’s nervous—he wipes his palms on his jeans as surreptitiously as he can, but he’s pretty sure Bucky notices anyway, even if he doesn’t comment on it.

They’re waiting on level 47, in the sitting room by the elevator. Steve took Bucky down to the kitchens for a meal after the others left, and then they spent hours walking the grounds. Bucky was careful not to show too much excitement when Steve suggested it, but once they were outside, he couldn’t hide his awe: standing in the middle of the path, head cocked as he listened to all the life buzzing around them, mouth hanging open as he stared at all the green. For all that he’d been reluctant to emerge from his slumber, Bucky seemed happy to be out and about, planting his feet and absorbing the brave new world around him.

They went back inside at nightfall, had dinner, and then Bucky goaded Steve into catching a few hours’ rest. Steve went with minimal protest—he’d been averaging about three hours of sleep a night for the past few weeks, and it was starting to take its toll. Bucky didn’t seem like he was going to sleep himself, but Steve didn’t press him on it. He’d been sleeping a lot, after all.

Steve’s not sure what Bucky did to occupy himself during the night, but when he woke, Bucky was there. It felt indescribably _right_ to have him around again, and as they headed down to the kitchens for breakfast, Steve marveled at the feeling: it was like his mind had finally reconnected with his body, and the two were working together for the first time in... well, in years.

The one big problem with that was the persistence of Bucky’s conditioning. It hung in the back of Steve’s mind all that morning, the knowledge that Bucky wouldn’t be here eating fruit with him and losing his shit over a cup of Wakandan coffee if Wanda hadn’t destroyed the cryochamber. That Bucky might not stick around for long if the others couldn’t convince Tony to help scrub the trigger words from his head.

As though summoned by Steve’s dark train of thought, Sam called him just as he sucked down the last dregs of his coffee. He said they’d managed to get Tony on a plane to Wakanda, and they were reasonably sure he’d be game to help (Steve didn’t ask him what _reasonably sure_ meant), but that in order to get him out there without alerting Ross to his absence, they’d had to invite Ross along as part of a bogus diplomatic meeting, renegotiating the terms of Wakanda’s cooperation with the Sokovia Accords. T’Challa, Sam, Nat, and Clint would beat Tony and Ross back to the palace only by a few minutes, whereupon the three non-Wakandans would make themselves scarce while T’Challa greeted his guests; in the meantime, it was up to Steve and Bucky to make it look like the fugitive Avengers were never there.

So they spent the morning clearing out the residential level, with the help of Scott and a small, efficient corps of palace staff, and then Steve and Bucky returned to level 47 as instructed. It’s one of the most secure levels in the building, as T’Challa describes it, bedecked with so many locks and scanners and alarms that there’s no way any of Ross’ people could wander in without tripping something. He said that was one of the reasons he’d placed Bucky up there—so Steve could rest assured no one would get in, and Bucky could rest assured no one would get out. Steve peeked through the door to the cryolab as they passed, and saw that the broken glass had been cleared from the floor, and several technicians now bent over the chamber with various disquieting tools, making their repairs—but he didn’t even have to say anything to Bucky for him to bypass the room altogether, and the two of them ended up back in the sitting room, on the same couch they’d occupied just a few nights before.

This is where they’re sitting when Steve gets a call from Sam saying they’ve just arrived and are heading up to 47, and that Tony and Ross are on a jet right behind them. Steve relays the information to Bucky, and then he wipes the nervous sweat none-too-subtly from his palms, knowing Bucky sees it even if he doesn’t comment on it. The red book sits next to Steve on the couch, tucked out of sight.

“You okay, Steve?”

Alright, so he does comment on it.

“Yeah,” Steve replies instantly. “Yeah, Buck, I’m—I’m fine. How about you?”

Bucky shrugs. “Pretty nervous,” he admits. “Last time we breathed the same air... well, you were there. I don’t have to tell you.”

Steve’s shoulders sag on the exhale. “Yeah. Right. Actually, I—I’m not doing so great, either. He was my friend, y’know? And then with everything that... it’s just. It’s a lot.”

Steve stares down at his hands in his lap. Bucky sits quietly.

“I’m hoping...” Steve starts, small. “I’m hoping we can mend some fences here today. And not just because we need his help—I really... I still care. Tony and the other Avengers, they were... they’re the closest thing I’ve got to a family in this century, apart from you.”

Bucky’s smile is sad. Steve’s ribs twinge at the sight.

“I hope so too,” Bucky says. “I want that for you. A family.”

Steve looks at him. Stares. Searches his face, half-closed as it is. Because... God, because when Bucky says _family_ like that, he makes it sound like the word can exist without him being a part of it.

“Bucky...” Steve presses his palms together, and they slip a bit, lubricated by a new layer of sweat. “You... you want this, right? To get rid of the words?” _To come back? To stay?_

“Hey.” And then Bucky’s thumbing Steve’s jaw, placating. When his eyes find Steve’s, they’re wide, earnest. “I want it. Of course I do.” His hand falls back to his side, and a shadow passes over his face. “I’m just... I mean, it’s normal for me to be scared, isn’t it? Not that anything about this situation is normal, exactly—but, y’know, we’re talkin’ about diving headfirst into something that...” His gaze lands somewhere on the cushion between them. “Like you said. It’s a lot.”

“They said this way would be totally safe. It’s just a hologram. It can’t hurt you,” Steve offers, and Bucky huffs a laugh.

“I know, Stevie. It’s not... That’s not what I’m scared of.”

“Then what?”

Bucky takes a deep breath before looking up again. When he speaks, he does so haltingly. “The linchpin,” Bucky says, “the thing that... that the words revolve around, that it all comes back to... Steve, you’re gonna—you’re gonna be there. You’ll see everything.” Bucky smiles as if through a shattered mirror, and murmurs, “You might hate me.”

Steve starts to shake his head. “Buck...”

And then he fully registers what Bucky said, and it stops him in his tracks.

“Bucky, do you—do you know what the linchpin is?”

And of course that’s the moment the others choose to arrive. Steve’s still staring at Bucky, at his raw eyes and his broken smile, when they walk in.

“Jesus, the place is _crawling_ with Ross’ guys,” Clint gripes, Sam and Nat entering behind him. “We barely made it up here in time. You guys cleared all our stuff from the residential level, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve answers, distracted, still staring at Bucky. “Yeah, we’re clear.”

Clint flops down onto an armchair with a sigh. “Thank god.”

A fourth head pops around the doorjamb.

“Can I come in?” Scott polls the room.

“Ain’t nobody stopping you,” Sam smirks.

Scott just grins. “Fantastic,” he says, and slides into a chair.

Nat glides over and perches next to Steve on the arm of the couch. “Okay?” she asks Steve, soft. He just nods.

Nat turns to Bucky then. “What about you? You doing alright?”

Bucky looks taken aback. He gapes at her for a second before stuttering, “Yeah. Yes, I’m—yeah.”

Shockingly, Natasha doesn’t look convinced, but she just leans over and pats his knee. “Buck up, Barnes.”

“Oh, ha ha,” Bucky deadpans. “Never heard that one before.”

“So, let me see if I’m understanding this right,” says Scott. “We’re here because Barnes—hi, how are you, nice to see you—needs to get his memory... cleansed? Bleached? And we need Tony to do that, for some reason, but in order to get Tony we had to get Ross, too, and now we have to hide up here so Ross doesn’t find us? Is that everything?”

“More or less, yeah,” says Sam.

“Great.” Scott looks a little nauseous. “Is there, uh—is there anything you guys need? Anything I can do? It’s just, I feel like everybody else here has a role, and I don’t have a role. I’d like to help, if I can.”

Clint blinks, sits up. “Actually, there is something. We could use a lookout. Just hang out by the elevator and let us know if Ross or any of his people try to get to our floor.”

“Great!” Scott looks elated. “I’ll go, uh, start doing that. Then. Okay.”

When Scott tries to sidle back out the door, though, he finds it blocked.

“Oh, hey! Your Highness, good to see you. And—and Tony Stark. Oh.” After a stunned pause, Scott angles himself back toward the rest of the room and stage-whispers, “Guys. Tony Stark is here.”

“Thanks, Bugboy. I think they know.”

“Well there’s no need to be _rude.”_ Scott’s pouting as he exits the room.

And then... and then Tony’s there, framed in the doorway, standing so still it’s like he’s hewn from marble, and Steve finds it just that much harder to breathe. He can’t tear his eyes away from Tony’s face—if he squints, he can see the faintest shadows of healing bruises—and Tony, it seems, is having a similar problem. He’s looking back and forth between Bucky and Steve, not blinking, his expression unreadable.

Tony seems to take a minute just to slow his breathing. Steve takes that minute and tries to _keep_ breathing. He reaches out, unthinking, and grips Bucky’s thigh.

The motion draws Tony’s eye. He looks from Steve’s hand on Bucky’s leg, up to Bucky’s face, and then his gaze lands on the stump of Bucky’s left arm. And it’s like something shatters.

“I got your letter,” Tony tells Steve. Randomly, Steve thinks, but he doesn’t say so.

T’Challa has, by this point, crossed the room and settled on another one of the couches, but it’s still a few seconds before Tony starts moving. When he does, it’s slow. A step at a time.

“Total dick move, by the way,” Tony says, eyes on Steve now. “You get to tell your whole side of the story, and I can’t say shit.”

“I sent a phone, too,” murmurs Steve. “You could’ve called.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I didn’t want to call. Maybe I didn’t want to talk to you ever again. Seeing as how you _betrayed_ me and all, I think that’s fair, don’t you?”

Steve winces. He has no response.

Tony keeps talking. “But here’s the thing. I’ve had a lot of time to think since you left. And, much as I didn’t want to, I thought a lot about you.” He glances at Natasha for the barest of moments, then at Sam. “In your letter,” he says to Steve, “you said the Avengers were my family, and that’s true. But you also said they were more my family than yours, and that’s not true. Jesus, Cap. That doesn’t even make sense. There _is_ no Avengers without you.”

Steve digs his fingers into Bucky’s thigh, and Bucky lets him. Tony looks from Steve to Bucky and back again.

“What he did... I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to forgive that. Understand—staying alive after my parents were gone was the hardest thing I ever had to do. But... but my mom’s biggest fear was always that I’d drive so many people away, I’d end up alone. And I know the last thing she would’ve wanted is for me to push someone away because of her. So... I’m here. Because she would’ve wanted me to be, and because you need me to be.” Tony spreads his arms magnanimously. “I’m here to save the day. As per usual.”

Steve’s vision blurs so much he can’t even see Tony anymore, and he ducks his head, swipes a thumb across both eyes.

“Tony...” he manages. “I don’t... I don’t know what to say.”

“Such a drama queen,” Tony grumbles, but Steve can hear the smile tugging at the words. “‘Thank you’ would be a good place to start.”

The laugh catches wetly in Steve’s throat. He makes sure to meet Tony’s eye as he says, “Thank you.”

Tony nods, eyes sparkling. Then his gaze drifts over to Bucky and stays there.

“So, then,” he says, straightening. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Tony takes the last few steps toward Steve and Bucky all at once, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a pair of glasses and a small metal disk as he does so. Beside Steve, Bucky shifts, starts to stand.

“Oh, no, no need to get up,” says Tony. “It’ll work just fine from there.”

Bucky settles back again stiffly.

Next to the couch now, Tony swivels, humming in consideration as he surveys the room.

“We’ll need a bit more space,” he decides. “If the peanut gallery wouldn’t mind lending a hand?”

Sam, Nat, and Clint all get to their feet and help clear a space in the center of the room. Steve’s about to join them, but then he feels Bucky’s hand in his, squeezing, his eyes stuck to the floor. Steve hesitates barely a fraction of a second before squeezing back.

“Hey,” whispers Steve. Bucky looks over, and Steve sends him a smile. “It’ll be alright,” he promises. Bucky doesn’t look convinced.

Tony sets the metal disk down in the middle of the newly-cleared floor, then crosses back to Steve and Bucky’s couch.

“Travel size,” he explains, even though no one asked. “I’ve got a bigger one at home. Cap, I believe you have something for me?”

“Oh—right.” Steve takes the red book from where it sits beside him, opens it to the trigger words, and hands it to Tony, who salutes him with the glasses in his other hand.

Tony turns to Bucky then, and, after the barest hesitation, holds the pair of glasses out to him.

“And these are yours,” he says evenly. “Just put ‘em on and hit the little button on the right, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Wait,” Bucky blurts.

“Yes, James?” says Tony, thick and mocking and just a little cold.

Bucky looks over at Steve, eyes full of... something, and then he carefully extracts his hand from Steve’s grip.

Clearing his throat, Bucky looks up at Tony. “I just want to say, it’s... it's really generous of you to do this. You didn’t have to.”

Tony’s gaze is tight as he looks at Bucky. “I’m not doing it for you,” he says.

Bucky nods. “I know. But I’m still grateful.” He bites his lip for a moment, brow furrowed, and then says, “And... and I know it can’t be worth much, you hearin' this from me, but I still—I just want you to know... I’m sorry.”

For a second, Steve actually thinks Tony’s gonna knock out Bucky’s teeth. But, after a few stunned half-breaths, the wild look fades from his eyes.

Wordlessly, Tony holds out the glasses again. Bucky takes them, slides them on.

Steve has just enough time to register how strangely endearing Bucky looks with glasses on before Bucky reaches up, finger hovering over the button, and his eyes find Steve’s.

“I’m sorry to you, too,” he says, again with that broken smile.

Steve doesn’t have time to ask for an explanation before Bucky’s pressing the button.

“Right! Let’s start from the top then, shall we? Word association. Show us the first thing that pops into your head.” Tony glances down at the red book in his hands, the green ink there, and then looks Bucky straight in the eye and says, _“Longing.”_

The disk in the center of the room flickers to life, thin bars of bright blue light shining out and drawing as yet unidentifiable patterns on the air. In the same instant, Bucky stiffens and groans beside Steve, hand flying up to his temple.

Steve leans in immediately, touching Bucky’s leg and whispering his name.

“Don’t worry, Cap. He’s just experiencing his first electromagnetic headache,” Tony explains. “All part of the process.”

Steve’s not totally convinced, but he clenches his teeth and nods, returning his attention to the hologram forming in front of them.

It’s a city street. Steve recognizes it—Brooklyn, 1926, maybe, or ’27. He realizes where they are, what memory this is, before he even sees the ten-year-old Bucky approaching, cradling a nine-year-old Steve in his arms.

“How’s the arm?” Bucky asks, rearranging Steve in his grip. The last of the blue lines disappears behind sheets of real-looking skin, and the illusion is complete.

“It’s fine, Buck,” Steve says, jaw set, “and so are my legs.”

“So here’s how this works,” Tony says, talking over the virtual boys. “Barnes calls up the memory, and the glasses record it and send it to the projector disk, which then projects it as a hologram. The reconstruction of subconscious detail on the virtual plane gives Barnes a limited amount of conscious control over the memory. Therefore, if a memory is particularly traumatic for him, he now has the power to change it. Find peace with it.”

Steve watches as his nine-year-old self rolls his eyes at something ten-year-old Bucky just said, then huddles in closer, laying his head on Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky stops walking. He closes his eyes and winds his arms tighter around the scrawny 1920s Steve... Brauny 2010s Steve doesn’t think it happened quite this way, but he can’t be sure.

“...Huh.” Tony blinks as the hologram starts to dissolve again. “That was quick.”

But the picture reforms. It cycles through several moments in quick succession: Steve recognizes the autoshop Bucky worked in as a teenager, and himself visiting on Bucky’s seventeenth birthday; he sees Bucky standing on the deck of a big boat, winding his fingers around the railing as the New York skyline sinks out of sight; that’s Bucky lying strapped to Zola’s table, and Steve, big now, tearing the bindings away, locking eyes with Bucky as he helps him up; there’s him and Bucky sitting on the floor of their tent on the front lines, drinking shitty coffee and choking down rations and cataloguing each other’s bruises; and there, there’s Bucky reaching for Steve’s outstretched hand as he falls from a moving train... But nothing about these memories seems to be changed.

Steve’s breathing hard by the time the image settles again.

It’s a pub. Steve recognizes it immediately—it’s the place where he won the would-be Howling Commandos’ loyalty with little more than a smile and a round of drinks; it’s the last place he raised a glass with Bucky, and, after the bombs hollowed it out and Steve’s life came down around his ears, it’s where he toasted Bucky’s memory, mercilessly sober.

A piano clunks away in the background, and a few dozen drunk soldiers raise their voices in song, and Steve realizes what night this is.

 _Adieu,_ the soldiers sing. _Adieu, adieu, adieu..._

“See? I told you,” Bucky calls to Steve, grinning. “They’re _all_ idiots.”

Bucky—his hair flopping over his face miraculously, his old World War II uniform clinging to his body like a glove—sucks down another gulp of his whiskey, watching as Steve settles on the empty stool beside him.

“How ‘bout you?” Steve asks, and looks at him. “You ready to follow _Captain America_ into the jaws of death?”

Bucky grins, shakes his head. “Hell no.” He stills, stares down at the bar, considering. “...That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight,” he says, smile twisting into something fond. He meets Steve’s eye. “I’m following him.”

Steve can see himself blushing as he looks away. Jesus, he’s blushing again now.

It gets even worse when Bucky nudges him, eyes him through his lashes as he asks, “But you’re keeping the outfit, right?”

“Oh my god,” Sam mutters a few feet away.

Steve knows he’s probably beet red by now—damn Irish complexion—but his 25-year-old self just glances at the poster behind him, the cheesy replication of his own star-spangled image.

“Y’know what?” he says. “It’s kinda growin’ on me.”

And Steve knows what happens next: this is when Peggy walks in, stunning the whole pub into silence in that incredible red dress; this is when she invites him to a briefing—unnecessary, he knows, when a phone call would have sufficed—and they look each other up and down like horny teenagers in the middle of the crowd; and then after all that, Bucky watches her walk away and, jealous, says _It’s like a horrible dream..._

...Only, that’s not what’s happening. This memory’s changed. A hush falls over the crowd in the next room, the music grinds to a halt, and 26-year-old Bucky stiffens like a bloodhound catching a scent.

This Bucky reaches out and grabs his Steve’s hand, and his Steve stares at him, surprised.

“C’mon,” Bucky says with a thousand-watt smile. “Let’s go out for a smoke.”

“Buck? Bucky, what’re you— _hey,_ ” Steve squawks, but he’s laughing as Bucky hauls him out the back door.

The hologram shifts, but not to an entirely new image. Instead, it transforms into a passable reconstruction of the alley behind the pub. Steve has no idea how accurate it is—he only knows what it looked like after the bombs.

Bucky bursts out into the alley, Steve in tow, and they’re both laughing and sparkling and so damn _young._ Bucky twirls Steve like he’s a dame on a dance floor, and Steve just laughs and laughs.

“Buck,” he protests. _“Buck._ C’mon.” This Steve smiles with all his teeth.

The two of them fall still at almost the exact same time, and then they’re just looking at each other in the dark.

“What’re we doin’ out here, Buck?” Steve asks, still smiling. “Do you even _have_ any smokes?”

Bucky grins, slow and sultry, and _Jesus._ Steve never saw him grin like that except with a dame.

“No,” Bucky says simply. “I don’t.”

Steve laughs, brow furrowed in confusion. “Then why’d you bring me out here?”

Bucky’s still grinning when he tells Steve, “Because we don’t have much time left, see.”

“Oh.” Steve nods slowly. “Yeah. I guess not.”

“Yeah. So,” Bucky says, “I’m gonna do this now, so I won’t regret it later.”

“Okay,” Steve breathes, smile fading.

Bucky’s gaze flicks down to Steve’s lips, then back up again.

“Your eyes have a bit of green in ‘em, y’know,” he says, matter-of-fact, and then he wraps the fingers of his left hand around the back of Steve’s neck and drags him down for a kiss.

Steve—older Steve, 21st-century Steve—is speechless, shaking. He can’t close his eyes, can’t look away, and as the virtual Bucky tilts his head and opens his mouth wide and hungry against the virtual Steve’s, all he can think is, _Oh._

It’s right around the time his virtual self slides his hands down around virtual Bucky’s hips that Steve looks away—right at Bucky, the real Bucky, who’s wide-eyed and visibly shivering beside him.

“Bucky,” Steve tries, but he just shuts his eyes.

There’s an unbearable smacking noise, and Steve looks back to find that his and Bucky’s virtual counterparts have separated again. Their lips are red and swollen, and they stare at each other intently.

“Now,” virtual Bucky pants, “I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything,” his Steve replies.

Bucky swallows. Then, “I need you to survive. Okay? Do whatever you have to do. Don’t go up in that plane, or if you have to, then find a way to ditch it before the crash. You _survive,_ you hear me? You don’t go into the ice. You keep on living through the 1940s, and ‘50s, and ‘60s. You marry that girl Peggy, and you pop out at least a dozen rugrats. And hey, maybe think about namin’ one of ‘em after me. Or don’t. Point is, you _live._ You live a full life. _This_ life. You got that?”

Virtual Steve nods, earnest. “Yeah, I got it, Buck. I’ll do that. I promise.”

And then, only then, does the hologram start to dissolve, bright blue threads picked one by one out of the image until the whole thing unravels.

The room is totally silent for the length of a single breath. Then Bucky breaks that silence, his voice unimaginably soft.

“The one word Wanda never got to,” he says. “Number one on the list.”

Bucky opens up his eyes and pins Steve to the spot with them.

“There’s your linchpin.”


	5. This feels right, and I'm letting it -- and now, I know just what to do.

Bucky wishes he were dreaming. He wishes that all this were still just in his head, that the things he sees and does and says were still nothing more than his own self-contained demons, that the wounds suffered from them were still just his own, and that he’ll find himself once more being wrenched into warmth and full consciousness by a Steve laced with spiderweb cracks who can’t possibly know any better.

But he isn’t dreaming. He’s awake, and Steve is watching him, and it’s clear from the look on his face that the spiderweb cracks of him have finally caved in.

“Bucky—” Steve starts, and Bucky—coward that he is, yellow as his belly has always been when bared to that peculiar Blue Marble gaze—is almost grateful for the cry that escapes him then, an automatic response to the hot column of pain that sears through his head at that very moment.

God, but it feels like someone’s trying to punch a hole through his head, one temple to the other, with one of those paper hole punchers. Bucky screws his eyes shut, and his voice scrapes jagged against the back of his throat as his hand flies to his head.

Tony’s crouched in front of him a moment later, snatching the glasses from Bucky’s face before he can damage them, Bucky guesses... except that when the glasses are gone, and Bucky’s still moaning and leaving little half-moon fingernail marks he can barely feel on his own temple, Tony stays crouched in front of him. His hands are surprisingly gentle—one rests on Bucky’s leg while the other lifts up an eyelid to examine his pupil—and his voice even more so as he talks Bucky down.

“Alright, kid. You’re alright. Deep breaths, just like you’re going to sleep.”

Bucky buries his confusion for the time being, focuses instead on following Tony’s directions. His hand doesn’t move from his temple, and his eyes remain firmly shut.

“Jeez,” Tony mutters. “You _are_ young, aren’t you?”

Bucky grunts. “I’m older than you, pal,” he grits out.

“Yeah, alright, grandpa.”

Bucky takes two more difficult breaths through his teeth, and then says to Tony, “You don’t... have to do this, y’know. I know... you hate it.”

“Who, _moi?_ Nonsense,” Tony scoffs. “I love caring for old people.”

That surprises a laugh out of Bucky, but it quickly morphs into another groan.

“Anyway,” Tony continues, “there’s nothin’ like poking around in somebody else’s head to make you realize you’re a jackass.”

When Bucky opens his eyes then, when he looks at Tony, he has to admit: he feels very, very young.

“Y’know, I’m not,” Tony begins, “I’m not so good at the whole _being wrong_ thing—”

“Apology accepted,” Bucky interjects, relief flooding his chest, stubborn hope planting roots just to the left of the pulsating lump of flesh there. His grimace ticks up briefly into a smile.

Tony blinks. “Jesus,” he says. “I think the caveman might be a better person than I am.”

“Oh, undoubtedly,” Clint pipes up from across the room.

Tony’s face scrunches disapprovingly at that, and Bucky fights down another laugh.

“Alright, alright, enough witty repartee,” he decides. Then, to Bucky, “Come on, Fabio, let’s go find you some painkillers.”

“The medical facilities on level 46 are secure,” T’Challa supplies.

“Perfect.”

As Tony levers him gingerly off the couch, ducking his shoulders beneath Bucky’s one good arm, snaking his own in turn around Bucky’s waist—as he gets up to leave, Bucky can’t help himself. He sneaks a glance at Steve.

Steve, who sits there, miserable, on the couch, unmoving except for his eyes, which flicker back and forth between Bucky’s face and the floor like he’s trying to convince himself not to look and failing. And damn if Bucky doesn’t know the feeling.

“Hey,” he says, soft, and gains Steve’s full attention almost instantly. He tries not to buckle beneath its weight.

Bucky doesn’t think he’s ready to hear Steve’s delicate apologies or his carefully-worded rejections. He’s not sure he’s ready for Steve’s questions. But there is one thing he does want to say. Truth is, it’s something he should’ve said a long time ago.

“Steve,” he starts. Stops. Searches for the words, running away from him through the fog of persistent pain inside his skull. “Steve, I’m...” _...sorry._

Steve just shakes his head. “Buck, don’t,” he says, his voice tiny, his smile tinier, and God, how many more times is this man gonna break Bucky’s heart with nothing more than a smile?

“It’s fine,” Steve’s saying, even though it’s not, but Bucky can’t seem to speak through the pain anymore, and thus he can’t argue. “We’ll talk later.”

That’s... fair, Bucky reasons. At the very least, he owes Steve an explanation. Much as he’s dreading it. He nods his assent.

“Yeah, yeah, come on,” Tony badgers, tugging him toward the door. “Let’s go get you drugged.”

The pain overtakes him then, and Bucky almost doesn’t register it as Tony pulls him from the room. He’s about thirty percent conscious on the way down to level 46, and it isn’t till he’s sitting on a hospital bed and Tony’s stepping away from him, empty syringe in hand, that Bucky feels himself settle back into his own shoes.

“Yeah, the headaches are pretty bad the first time.” Tony sounds contrite. “Haven’t quite been able to work out that kink yet.”

Bucky’s hand drifts back up to graze his forehead with his fingertips, and he blinks hard twice. “It’s fine,” he says sincerely. “Believe me, you’ve... you’ve done more than enough.”

Tony hums. “Right.”

Silence descends between them. Bucky takes the time to stretch his muscles, pop a few joints.

“So,” says Tony. “You’re in love with Steve.”

His tongue forms clumsily around the words, like he doesn’t quite believe he’s saying them, and Bucky really can’t blame him. He doesn’t know what else to say, so he shrugs.

Tony whistles. “That’s... Actually, that makes sense. That makes a _lot_ of sense. Wow.”

Bucky just watches Tony, his confusion growing. “Listen, you’re... I’m really grateful for your help and all. Really, I am. But I don’t want you to... You don’t have to keep doing this. Being so... civil. You don’t have to let me off the hook so easy.”

Tony just shakes his head. “Like I said, it’s pretty hard to stay mad at somebody once you’ve seen inside their head. Especially when what’s in their head is something like _that_ —great technique, by the way. Seriously. Looked like a good kiss.”

Bucky feels his face heat as he quashes the memory. “But you’re still... Aren’t you still mad?”

A muscle in Tony’s jaw jumps, and he sighs. “Well, yeah, grandpa. Of course. I’ve been angry about my parents’ death for more than half my life, now, and I’ll probably keep on being angry for the rest of it. And I’m not—It doesn’t make me... happy, knowing that you’re the one who...” He purses his lips. “But the truth is that I just needed a scapegoat, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That guy in there?” He taps Bucky’s skull gently with a fingertip. “The guy whose biggest regret is that he couldn’t be the family his best friend deserved... He’s not a killer, and I can’t in good conscience keep treating him like one.”

Tony spreads his hands, a gesture of supplication. “I’ve been trying to be a better person,” he says, “and I dropped the ball for a minute there. I let the pain get in my way. But that’s why I invented these things in the first place,” and here Tony pats his jacket pocket, where Bucky knows he’s got the glasses tucked away. “Because I didn’t want to be ruled by pain anymore. I wanted to be the best possible version of myself I could be. I wanted to be better.

“So... hi,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m Tony. And you, my disgustingly pretty friend, must be Bucky. It’s nice to meet you.”

Bucky blinks back the sting in his eyes. He takes Tony’s hand.

“Thank you,” Bucky breathes.

Tony’s brow furrows. “Why, what could you possibly have to thank me for, good sir? We’ve only just met!”

Bucky shakes his head, smiling. “I’m glad he found people like you,” he says. “You and the other Avengers, you... I’m glad he found himself such a good family.”

Tony watches him, assessing. “You could be his family too, y’know.”

Bucky feels his smile flicker. “I don’t... I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, c’mon. There’s plenty of space at the compound,” Tony insists. Then, “He made up a room for you.”

And that, Bucky was not expecting.

“What?”

Tony shrugs. “He made up a room for you. At the compound. It’s comfy, too. Seems like he wanted you to stick around awhile.”

The smile cuts, harsh, into the side of Bucky’s face. It probably looks more like a grimace. “He may have changed his mind about that, now,” Bucky murmurs.

But Tony just rolls his eyes with a long-suffering sigh. “Birds of a feather, I swear... _Oh no, poor me, how will anyone ever love me?_ Meanwhile, _three feet away_...” Tony shakes himself, looks at Bucky. “Just... just, go talk to him. Okay? I think we’ve established pretty well at this point the kind of damage you can do when you refuse to talk things over.”

Bucky winces at that. “Yeah,” he agrees, stomach twisted in nervous knots. “Yeah. Okay.”

 

*~*~*

 

_Tell him,_ Wanda said. _You have to tell him. He doesn’t know._

The others say basically the same thing.

“So I take it you _haven’t_ told him, then,” says Sam as soon as Bucky and Tony are out of earshot. “Jesus. I thought this was common knowledge.”

“I think if it were, we wouldn’t have this particular set of problems,” Nat points out.

“There is a definite tension between them. I noticed it as soon as I first saw them together,” adds T’Challa. “I had already assumed the presence of an unspoken truth there, though I did not realize it would be so important.”

Clint chimes in, “See? The handcuffs wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.”

“Oh my god.” Steve buries his face in his hands.

They go on like this for a while. Steve just sits, quiet, reeling, as the sun sinks down into the misty jungle outside. Bucky really... God. And for all that _time_...

Steve keeps replaying that kiss over and over again in his head. He thinks of folding his own hands around Bucky’s hips like that, trapping Bucky’s swollen lip between his own, eliciting those tiny, wanton sounds...

Steve’s had thoughts like this before, but he never entertained them for long. It made him feel like he was taking advantage of Bucky’s trust, somehow. It made him feel guilty. Now, he starts to think maybe he doesn’t have to be.

“Right. Well, I’m outta here,” Sam declares, rising to his feet. “I’m sure you’ll want some privacy for when you guys... talk.”

“Sam,” Steve chides, his face heating.

“I’m out, too,” says Clint. Then to T’Challa, “Where can we still go?”

“The common space on level 48 should suit us nicely, I think,” T’Challa replies. “The level is accessible only to myself and my staff. Perhaps we can take this time to convert it into temporary living quarters for all of you.”

“Sold!” Clint winks in Steve’s direction before flouncing from the room.

“Go get ‘em, Tiger,” Sam rumbles, clapping him on the shoulder before he follows on Clint’s heels.

On her way out, Natasha sing-songs from the doorway, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

T’Challa pauses at the threshold. “There is a drawer in the cryolab—top row, far right-hand side. It may be of some use to you.”

It takes Steve a minute, and then he’s spluttering. “Oh, no, Your Highness—I mean, uh, thank you, but it’s not—we’re—”

“Goodnight.” T’Challa’s eyes sparkle as he, too, leaves the room.

And then Steve finds himself alone. He settles back into the couch. Wiggles his feet. Twiddles his thumbs. Fidgets so much he annoys _himself,_ and then forces himself to close his eyes and take deep breaths, every muscle in his body still.

Steve feels much calmer when he opens his eyes. He lets his head fall back on the couch, and for a while he just allows himself to be pressed down into it by the dense canopy of stars flickering to life outside the window.

This is how Bucky finds him, staring up at the stars, calm but for the trembling of his heartbeat at his throat. Steve looks up at his approach, and, seeing him there, finds himself at a loss for words.

“Listen,” Bucky dives in, “before you say anything, I just want you to know—I tried to, to keep it from you. I tried not to bother you with it. It’s... I’m selfish, y’know? But I didn’t want to be, not with you. I know you don’t—and I, I never would have asked you for a thing. Not ever.”

The smile creeps up on Steve. Before he knows it, though, he’s shaking with silent laughter.

Bucky looks very confused.

It's just funny, is all -- in a sad sort of way. The symmetry. Because Steve's got this voice in his head, and it's been there for years, decades, his whole life. Over and over again, he says to the voice, _I can get by on my own._ And over and over again, the voice replies, _The thing is... you don't have to._

He'd stopped being able to hear it for a while there. But somehow, Steve doesn't think that voice ever really went away. He thinks of his friends, new and old, lost and found; more voices add to the first -- _Let me help... I'm on his side... I'm here because you need me to be... I didn't want you to be alone_ \-- and Steve realizes, with startling clarity, that he was wrong. That he's never, not once, been on his own.

He stares at his friend -- his oldest friend; his first friend -- and takes in his confusion. Cracks it open, sees the fear and the vulnerability underneath. And for the first time, Steve understands: Bucky doesn't get it yet. He has yet to notice the fact that he isn't -- never was -- alone.

Steve gets to his feet, crosses toward Bucky.

“You'd _never_ ask, huh?” he asks, still smiling.

Steve stops in front of Bucky, who’s stuck in the same spot like his feet have spontaneously sprouted roots. He watches with wide, disbelieving eyes as Steve brushes a lock of hair out of his face.

“I wish you would,” murmurs Steve, and waits for Bucky to get it.

And he does. Of course he does.

Bucky blinks several times, fast. Licks his lips.

“Steve...” His voice is rough. His eyes glisten faintly in the starlight, but in spite of this, the corner of Bucky's lip twitches up, and he says, “Your eyes have a bit of green in ‘em, y’know,” and tips forward. Steve feels Bucky’s breath on his lips, Bucky’s fingers ghosting along his waist. Those fingers wind themselves hard into the fabric of Steve’s shirt. And then Bucky’s kissing him.

Steve surges forward instantly, the touch of Bucky’s lips like a trigger. His hands cup Bucky’s hips, gripping them, hard, and Bucky makes this tiny noise as he yanks Steve closer, hand rising up to wind around the back of Steve’s neck, tangle in his hair. Steve’s breathing harshly against Bucky’s mouth, but Bucky’s breathing hard, too, and Steve tugs him closer and drowns in the warmth of his skin.

“Steve,” Bucky says, the sound of it broken, as Steve starts walking them both backward.

“I know,” Steve huffs between fevered kisses. “I know.”

Steve rams into the corner of a couch then, stumbling, nearly sending both of them toppling to the floor. The laugh bubbles out of both of them, too, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes reveling in the absurdity of it all.

Steve doesn’t stop walking until he feels his back ram against the window, hands roaming beneath Bucky’s shirt now, fingernails leaving long red welts on the snowy expanse of skin there. Bucky doesn’t stop even then, crowding Steve until they’re pressed together from ankle to Adam’s apple, Bucky leaning past Steve’s face to trail kisses down his jaw, nip lightly at the space just below his ear. He wedges a solid thigh between both of Steve’s, grinding up against Steve, who’s already half-hard, and Steve bites off a moan.

“Jesus Christ, Stevie,” Bucky croaks, rutting himself slow and rhythmic against Steve’s leg. “I can’t believe... Is this real? Am I dreaming?”

“You’re _dreamy,”_ Steve quips before he can stop himself, and it sets Bucky giggling, reeling back to look Steve in the face, incredulous. Steve takes advantage of the movement, slipping his hands under Bucky’s shirt again and lifting it up, up, over, watching Bucky’s hair cascade around his face as his shirt drops to the floor.

Steve lets his hands snake around to the small of Bucky’s back, slipping his fingertips inside Bucky’s waistband and leaning in close again as he says fondly, “Only way you’re dreaming is if I’m dreaming, too.”

Bucky pecks him on the lips. “Not entirely outside the realm of possibility,” he reasons, and kisses Steve again. And again.

Steve presses Bucky’s hips to his own, hard, and drinks in Bucky’s moan.

“Shirt. Off,” Bucky demands, tugging at the offending article. “Come on, Rogers. Don’t make me ask again.”

Steve laughs into Bucky’s mouth, pressing one last, long kiss there before he leans away and tries to comply with Bucky’s wishes. It’s made significantly more difficult by the fact that Bucky doesn’t seem to want to give him any room.

Finally, the shirt comes free, and then Bucky’s crowding Steve against the window, seemingly trying for the maximum amount of skin-to-skin contact. Steve just digs his fingernails into Bucky’s hips and breathes, ragged, as Bucky grinds their hips together.

“Fuck... _Fuck,_ Steve,” Bucky hisses, coiling his fingers around Steve’s. “Want your hands,” he begs, “God, Stevie, you got such gorgeous hands—” And then he takes the one he’s captured and drags it to his own fly, Steve’s fingers pinned awkwardly between their bodies as Bucky guides him in undoing his pants. When Steve’s fingertips brush against the length of Bucky through his underwear, they both shudder on the exhale.

Steve grips Bucky by the hips again, whips them both around so now Steve’s the one pressing Bucky into the glass, the cushion of the firmament leaking starlight into Bucky’s long hair, midnight-dark in the low light, and Steve just can’t stop himself from burying the fingers of his free hand in the soft strands.

“Steve,” Bucky pants between the kisses Steve plants on his lips, the erratic strokes of Steve’s fingers against Bucky’s still-clothed cock. Bucky’s hips cant up toward his hand with each one, and Steve stares, mesmerized. “Steve, _please_ —”

And then Steve reclaims both his hands and splays them across Bucky’s ribs, dips his nose into Bucky’s throat and inhales the heady scent of him, laps at the sweat there. Bucky keens, and Steve bucks his hips once, twice, grinding their cocks together and choking on the friction.

Then he swivels Bucky around, quick, and presses him into the glass from behind, plunging his hand into Bucky’s boxer briefs as he grinds his own cock against the swell of Bucky’s ass, and they both moan.

Steve works Bucky in his hand, pausing to lick a long stripe up his own palm, taking advantage of the beads of precome he finds to slick Bucky’s cock as best he can. It’s a little rough, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, if the sounds he makes are anything to go by.

And Jesus Christ, the _sounds._

“Stevie,” Bucky whines, and his fingernails sink into the skin of Steve’s thigh through his jeans. “Stevie, I’m gonna—oh, _god,_ I love your hands—”

Steve presses his face into Bucky’s hair, his mouth to Bucky’s ear. “Come for me, Buck. C’mon.”

Bucky whimpers. _“Fuck.”_ He leans into Steve, pressing his palm to the window and thrusting his ass back against Steve’s cock.

 _“Bucky,”_ Steve moans, and he works his hand faster, and Bucky’s making this wordless little high-pitched noise over and over again, until he’s not—until he’s arching back into Steve, sweat-slick skin sliding against Steve’s chest, a ragged, rusty cry of pleasure pouring out of him.

Steve spares a moment’s remorse when he sees the streaks of Bucky’s come on the window, but then a liquid, languid Bucky is turning around in his embrace, hooking his arm around Steve’s neck and capturing his mouth in a filthy, open-mouthed kiss. Steve’s whole body melts, his skeleton crumbling like a Jenga tower.

Bucky hums as his mouth leaves Steve’s, finds his jaw, his throat, his collarbone. He nips at Steve’s oversensitized skin with his teeth on the way down, unwinds his arm from Steve’s neck and rubs his thumb across a nipple instead, and Steve shivers.

When Bucky drops unceremoniously to his knees, eyeing with evident pleasure the bulge at the front of Steve’s pants, Steve thinks he might pass out.

Bucky just grins, wicked and wide. “What, d’you think I’d forget?” He works open the button on Steve’s jeans, drags the zipper down with painful deliberation, tugs Steve’s underwear down after it.

Steve’s cock springs free, hard and leaking, and Bucky just stares. Licks his lips. Steve thinks he hears himself whimper.

The look Bucky shoots him—supercilious, triumphant—confirms it, and with that look, Bucky leans forward till his lips are pressed to the tip, curled around it in an almost tender kiss. Then Bucky takes the head in his mouth, tongue swirling, lapping up beads of pre-come, and Steve chokes on his moan, hand flying out to lodge in Bucky’s hair.

Bucky hums, leaning up into Steve’s touch, and the vibrations make Steve’s eyelids flutter. Bucky takes Steve further into his mouth, and Steve exhales once, harsh, his hand spasming in Bucky’s hair.

It’s when Bucky adds suction to the mix that Steve loses it.

 _“Bucky,”_ he whines, the word broken in two places. Bucky hums, which of course makes Steve’s fingers tighten in his hair, his hips canting forward without his permission. Bucky seems to take this as encouragement, because he takes Steve just a little deeper, sucks a little harder, and he’s looking up at Steve now through his lashes, face flushed, cheeks hollow, eyes so fucking blue—

Steve comes with Bucky’s name on his lips, hips lurching forward once, twice, though he tries his best to stop them. Bucky takes it in stride, swallowing around Steve’s cock and causing little sparks to dance at the edges of Steve’s vision as he pulls off, panting, wiping his mouth.

Bucky stands again and plants a sloppy kiss to Steve’s lips, his tongue bringing Steve’s own taste inexorably into his mouth. Steve pulls Bucky close and loses himself in it.

“So I take it you’re not mad,” Bucky says, mild, when they finally separate. His eyes sparkle with champagne bubbles of mirth, and Steve just laughs.

“Actually, y’know what?” he says, fingers brushing through the tips of Bucky’s hair. “I _am_ mad. I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t want to know. Why on Earth would you think that?”

An edge of uncertainty has crept into Bucky’s expression. He shrugs. “I dunno. I guess I just thought... maybe you’d be happier with someone else.”

Steve stares. “Bucky. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Bucky huffs a laugh.

“I’m serious,” Steve insists. “And if that’s where those trigger words got all their power from—from this insane idea that I’d be happier with _anyone_ than I am with you... well, then we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

He cups Bucky’s face in one hand, swipes a thumb over Bucky’s cheek. Bucky’s eyes are bright with a mixture of disbelief and hope that Steve is intimately familiar with.

“I want you,” Steve says, firm. “I want to be with you. You’re family, Buck.”

Bucky’s staring at him with this watery smile, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

"You sure I'm not dreaming?" Bucky presses, his voice faint.

Steve kisses him.

“Next time you want to jump my bones, you tell me,” Steve says, and it isn't an answer, but it is. “Alright?”

Bucky nods, blue eyes shining. “Alright.”

A beat.

“...Hey, Steve? I got somethin’ to tell you.”

And then Steve _really_ laughs. 

 

*~*~*

 

And they were home free, Steve thought. Happily ever after. All his problems solved with good sex.

In retrospect, he should’ve known better.

 

*~*~*

 

They think they’ve gotten rid of the conditioning. They’re reasonably sure. But there’s no real way to test it unless somebody recites the words in Bucky’s presence. And the problem is, Bucky’s having none of it.

“Come on, Buck,” Steve tries, leaning against the exam table next to Bucky. “It’s not gonna be Hydra this time, or Zemo. It’ll be us. And you’ll be completely contained.” Steve gestures at the glass-walled chamber behind him. “If the words work, then worst-case, we’ll knock you out and start over again. And if they don’t, then you’re free.”

They’re on level 46, outside a medical isolation unit intended to contain the spread of deadly infection. T’Challa had assured them that it could contain far more, if need be.

Bucky just shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Steve,” he says, adamant. “I won’t risk it. I won’t put you or anyone else in harm’s way like that. If there’s any chance, any at all, that it could go wrong... I just don’t want any more blood on my hands.”

Steve sags. “Okay. Alright, we’ll... We’ll find another way. Maybe the glasses can give us some insight, or—or Wanda, after she’s had time to heal, and she’s worked through her trauma...”

“Sure, Steve.” Bucky claps him on the shoulder. “We’ll find another way.”

Bucky leaves the isolation ward, but Steve hesitates.

They don’t talk about the cryochamber. Bucky’s out and about now, walking, talking, eating, living, and spending his nights with Steve. But the cryochamber is only days away from being repaired, and Steve hasn’t had the courage yet to ask what Bucky intends to do once it’s fixed.

Steve knows now that Bucky cares for him, deeply. But that could end up being the very reason he chooses to leave.

Forcibly unclenching his fists, smoothing the furrow from his brow, Steve follows Bucky out of the ward.  

 

*~*~*

 

Meanwhile, the bogus diplomatic session with Ross drags on.

“I am becoming concerned,” T’Challa admits, about a week after Ross arrives. “In our negotiations, he becomes obsessed with minor details, poking holes even in the grammatical structure of the agreements we’ve drawn up. I fear he may realize we are not disclosing everything to him, and he is intentionally drawing out negotiations in order to buy himself time to investigate.” T’Challa looks at Steve, urgent. “He has been dissuaded twice now from following palace staff up past level 45.”

“Shit,” mutters Sam. “What about you, Tony? How’s he been with you?”

“Honestly, it’s hard to say,” Tony replies. “He’s got his nasty Tell-Tale Heart eye on me night and day, but he did that before, too. The truth is he never really trusted me, and I just can’t tell if anything’s changed.”

Steve grimaces. “I hate to say it, Tony, but we may have to confine you to 45 and below, too. If he sees you heading up here and decides to start poking around, it’s all over.”

“And just when I thought we were friends again.”

Natasha chimes in. “Tony’s not the only risk factor here, though. We need to come up with a more permanent solution. If Ross keeps making up reasons to hang around, then we need to make up a reason for him to get the fuck out.”

“Okay, yeah,” Steve agrees. “Any ideas?”

Nobody speaks up. Steve swallows his dread.

 

*~*~*

 

It happens two days later.

Steve is visiting Wanda in her recovery room on level 46. She’s improved significantly in the last ten days; she’s able to stand for longer and longer each day, and for when she can’t, she has her friends to recommend books and movies and just sit by her bedside and talk. The revelation that she had not, in fact, volunteered for the procedure that gave her her abilities hit her pretty hard, but having Bucky to confide in seems to help.

Steve makes a point of visiting Wanda once a day, and keeps her apprised of all the latest gossip. Today, she’s asked him about Bucky.

“He seems... better,” Steve says. “It helps to have all our feelings out in the open. It’s not—things aren’t perfect, but at least now I feel like we can talk to each other.”

Wanda smiles. “I’m glad. And he’s staying out of cryofreeze?”

Steve shrugs. “Yeah, though I’m not sure if it’s by choice or because the chamber’s still broken. T’Challa says it’ll be good as new by tomorrow, so... I guess we’ll see.”

“You haven’t asked him what he’ll do?”

“Uh... no. To be honest, that’s the one thing I don’t feel like I can talk to him about. It’s not because of him, though—it’s just... I’m too afraid of what his answer might be.”

Wanda reaches out, grazes Steve’s arm with her fingertips. “I think if you told him how much you’d like him to stay, he would do it.”

“...Maybe. But we still don’t know if his conditioning’s gone yet. Regardless of how much he cares for me, and you, and everybody—or maybe even because of how much he cares—he might decide the risk is just too much for him to remain free.”

“My, my. What a hero.”

Wanda’s face goes flat, drained of all color. Steve follows her gaze.

Thaddeus Ross stands in the doorway, surveying them, a cool glint in his eye.

“Well if it isn’t two of my favorite vigilantes,” he says jovially. “You know, for fugitives, you sure don’t seem to be trying that hard to stay hidden.”

“How’d you get up here?” demands Steve, positioning himself between Wanda and Ross.

“Son, everyone has a weakness. Even the unflappable staff of the good king T’Challa.”

Ross takes several steps closer. Steve straightens, dearly missing his shield.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” says Ross, voice cold. “You and all your friends are going to leave Wakanda on my jet. You’re going to come back to the Raft prison. And you are going to spend the remainder of your unnaturally long life rotting in a cell.” He shrugs. “Then again, maybe I can be persuaded to make your life a little shorter.”

Sneering, Ross takes another step forward. Steve stiffens, holds his ground.

“You’re not gonna lay another hand on her,” he growls.

 _Steve,_ Wanda’s voice drifts into his head. _Don’t worry. Help is on its way._

And then, to Steve’s utter horror, another figure careens down the hallway, calling his name.

“Steve!” Bucky halts in the doorway, taking in the situation.

A positively predatory look passes over Ross’ face. Steve feels sick.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” he murmurs, sounding far too pleased. “We’ve missed you since Berlin.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Just my job. Apprehending a group of dangerous criminals.”

“With no weapons? No backup? No offense, but I’m down an arm right now, and I could still snap you in half.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I don’t mean to take you by force. That would be silly—you’re basically indestructible. But one of you is not—take his armor away, and he’ll bleed as quickly as anyone else.”

Steve blanches. _Tony._

“So. If you want him to live to sass me another day, I suggest you pay attention.”

Steve seeks out Bucky’s gaze. He looks resigned.

Ross herds the three of them down the hall. He stops outside the isolation unit.

“Ah, yes, this will do nicely,” he says, pleased.

Ross opens the door to the little glass cage and ushering Steve, Bucky, and Wanda inside. The sound of the door clanging shut strikes Steve’s ears with a haunting finality.

“Now you’ll just have to stay here until the cavalry arrives.”

 _T’Challa and the others are on their way,_ Wanda’s voice informs him, and Steve tries not to let his relief shine through.

“Actually... this presents quite an opportunity,” Ross is saying.

He’s far less scary when Steve knows his control over the situation is temporary. Steve starts counting the seconds until the others arrive.

Ross is looking at Bucky now. “I met a friend of yours recently,” he says. “Helmut Zemo.”

Steve’s blood freezes.

“He showed me an interesting trick. I’d like to try it out, if you don’t mind.”

No. No, no, no, no. _No._

Without looking away from Bucky, Ross begins, “желание...”

 _“No.”_ Bucky’s shaking his head, shaking his head, his hand pressed to his ear, but he can only cover one of them.

“...ржaвый...” Ross continues, advancing slowly. “...Семнадцать...”

And Bucky’s already screaming, a guttural cry as he throws himself against the glass. But Steve knows he can’t break out of here—that was the point, right?

“Wanda,” he’s saying, desperate. “Steve. Get away—you have to—”

“...Рассвет...” comes Ross’ voice. “...Печь...”

Bucky crumples to the floor, still shaking his head hysterically. Steve goes to him as though he’s been pulled.

“...Девять...”

“Bucky. Bucky, look at me.”

“...добросердечный...”

“Listen—it won’t work.”

“...возвращение на родину...”

“We got rid of them. Okay? Your mind is your own.”

“...Один...”

“Bucky.” When he looks up, Bucky’s eyes are wild. “Trust me,” Steve says, soft, and smiles.

“...грузовой вагон.”

Steve waits, not breathing. His hand doesn’t move from where it rests on Bucky’s back.

Slowly, Bucky’s spine unfurls, and his head rises. A sharp breath huffs from his lungs.

When his eyes find Steve’s, they’re wide and shining.

“It... it didn’t work.” Bucky can’t seem to decide whether he’s about to laugh or cry. “He couldn’t... the words didn’t work.”

“Of course not,” Steve scoffs. “I said so, didn’t I?”

Bucky whimpers then, losing his balance as his legs seem to give out beneath him.

Steve gathers a trembling Bucky to his chest, and only when his face is safely hidden from view over Bucky’s shoulder does Steve let the relief break over him, too.

When he chances a look at Wanda, she’s glowing with pride.

“Hmm,” murmurs Ross. “Disappointing.”

“I must agree, Mr. Secretary.”

And there’s T’Challa, finally. He sweeps regally into the room, flanked by Nat, Sam, Clint, Tony, Scott, and half a dozen of his Dora Milaje.

“It is immensely disappointing when a guest in your home oversteps his bounds,” T’Challa goes on. “But even more disappointing than that is when a trusted world leader is found guilty of breaking international law.”

Ross looks unimpressed. “Excuse me?”

“Your treatment of those enhanced individuals who refused to comply with the Sokovia Accords,” T’Challa clarifies. “I have at my disposal a frankly disturbing volume of security footage, as well as eyewitness testimony, indicating that you, Secretary Ross, are guilty of using unnecessary force and inflicting unsanctioned coercion techniques upon those whom you took prisoner. You will be found guilty of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.”

Ross gapes. “Are you kidding? I’m the U.S. Secretary of State. I’ve got pull in every one of the countries on the Security Council, and most of the ones off it. They’ll never try me before the U.N., and even if they do, you’ll never get a tribunal to convict.”

“Why don’t we wait and see, shall we? Take him.”

The Dora Milaje step forward and bodily grab hold of Ross, who flinches and sneers and finally allows himself and his tattered dignity to be led from the room.

Meanwhile, Nat crosses to the keypad beside the cage. A few moments later, Clint is darting inside to scoop the still-healing Wanda off the ground.

On their way out of the cage, Steve lends his shoulder to Bucky, who’s still a little unsteady on his feet. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen Bucky looking so hopeful.

“Thank you,” Steve breathes, looking around at the faces of his friends. “All of you.”

Sam shrugs. “That’s what family’s for, right?”

“Yeah, plus, it was _so_ worth it to finally see that pompous asshat taken down all the pegs,” says Tony, looking thoroughly satisfied.

“And you’re alright?” Steve asks him. “They didn’t hurt you?”

“Oh, god no,” Tony answers. “Thundercat over here swooped in after like a minute and bailed me out.”

“...You all know what this means, right?” says Nat. “The authority of the Accords has been compromised. At best, they’ll have to be revised; at worst, they’ll get scrapped. And either way, Ross isn’t around anymore to hunt us down just for looking the wrong way.” She looks around at them all. “We can go home.”

The implications of that possibility settle slowly, in silence. Something like hope hovers, warm, over all their heads.

The room empties, everyone going their separate ways to start planning a future that didn’t exist yesterday. Steve’s still got his arm around Bucky as they drift down the hall; he’s not sure Bucky needs his shoulder anymore, but he likes having him close, anyway.

“So,” Steve says, excitement bubbling in his belly. “You’re free.”

“Yeah...” And then Bucky grins, impossibly bright, and this sweet little elated laugh bursts out of him. “Yeah, I am.”

“No more cryochamber,” says Steve.

“Nope,” says Bucky.

“There’s, uh,” Steve starts, suddenly shy, “there’s a room for you at the compound, if you want it. Or—or you’re welcome in mine. Whatever you want.”

Bucky smiles fondly. “I’d like that.”

The two of them wait for the elevator to arrive, and Steve’s mind just keeps working. It’s like the future’s suddenly opened its doors to him, as many possibilities for his life, and for Bucky’s, as there are stars in the thick black canopy of the sky. Steve could start sketching again. Bucky could write. They could carve out space for themselves among friends, and go back to picking fights for the little guy.

The elevator door opens, and Steve feels younger than he has in a long time. He tightens his arm around Bucky and steps out into this brave new world.


End file.
